iiii! 


; 

I! 


THE 

HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 
AT  THE  WAYSIDE 


THE 

HAWTHORKE  CENTENARY 
CELEBRATION 

AT 

THE  WAYSIDE 
CONCORD,  MASSACHUSETTS 

JULY  4-7,  1904 


BOSTON  AND   NEW   YORK 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN   AND  COMPANY 

ftitoerfi&c  pres 
1905 


COPYRIGHT    1905    BY   HOUGHTON,    MIFFLIN   &    CO0 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 


Published  February, 


THE  WAYSIDE,  Concord,  Massachusetts,  was  the 
only  home  ever  owned  by  Nathaniel  Hawthorne, 
who  gave  it  that  name  when  he  purchased  it,  in 
1852,  from  Amos  Bronson  Alcott.  It  passed,  in 
1883,  from  the  possession  of  George  Parsons 
Lathrop  and  Rose  Hawthorne  Lathrop,  his  wife, 
into  the  ownership  of  Daniel  Lothrop,  the  pub 
lisher,  whose  family  residence  it  became. 

It  seemed,  therefore,  to  be  of  logical  fitness  with 
the  spirit  observed  by  the  present  owners  through 
all  these  later  years  of  residence,  in  which  the 
estate  has  been  safeguarded  and  perpetuated  by 
Mr.  Lothrop,  and  afterward  by  his  widow,  as  Haw 
thorne  left  it,  that  an  observance  of  the  one  hun 
dredth  anniversary  of  his  birth  should  here  be 
celebrated. 

The  Centenary  exercises,  as  planned  and  ar 
ranged  by  Mrs.  Lothrop,  were  memorial  addresses 
and  reminiscences,  with  the  unveiling  of  the  bronze 
tablet  set  in  a  boulder  on  the  path  leading  to  the 


vi 

hill,  where  Hawthorne  daily  paced  to  and  fro  in 
solitary  communion  with  his  work ;  these  exercises 
to  take  place  on  the  birthday,  July  4 ;  to  be  fol 
lowed  on  the  mornings  of  July  5,  6,  and  7,  by 
addresses  at  the  Hillside  Chapel  (the  chapel  of 
the  Concord  School  of  Philosophy,  next  The  Way 
side)  ;  these  addresses  to  be  given  by  eminent  men 
and  women  peculiarly  fitted  to  bring  tribute  to  the 
great  Romancer. 

Acknowledgment  is  made  to  Mr.  Thomas  Went- 
worth  Higginson  for  his  kindness  in  editing  and 
preparing  this  volume  for  the  press. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

FIRST  DAY,  JULY  FOURTH 

Address  of  Thomas  Wentworth  Hig-ginson 3 

Unveiling  of  the  Tablet 12 

Letter  from  Mrs.  Rose  Hawthorne  Lathrop 14 

From    Concord    to    Concord    in    Hawthorne's    Life,    by 

Charles  T.  Copeland 15 

Letter  from  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman 21 

SECOND  DAY,  JULY  FIFTH 

The   World   in  which   Hawthorne    lived,   by   Mrs.   Julia 

Ward  Howe 30 

Hawthorne's  Place  in  Literature,  by  Charles  Francis  Adams    42 

THIRD  DAY,  JULY  SIXTH 

Hawthorne  in  Italy,  by  Mrs.  Maud  Howe  Elliott  ....  80 
Hawthorne's  Last  Years,  by  Julian  Hawthorne  ....  105 
The  World  set  in  Hawthorne's  Heart,  by  Moncure  D. 

Conway 118 

Letter  from  Dr.  Richard  Garnett 134 

FOURTH  DAY,  JULY  SEVENTH 

Reminiscences,  by  Hon.  John  S.  Keyes 139 

Letter  from  Mrs.  Rose  Hawthorne  Lathrop 146 

Hawthorne    and    Transcendentalism,   by   Frank    Preston 

Stearns 150 

The  Friendships  of  Hawthorne,  by  F.  B.  Sanborn      .     .     .158 


viii  CONTENTS 

Letters  from  Miss  Beatrix  Hawthorne 199 

Hon.  John  D.  Long 200 

Hon.  Henry  Cabot  Lodge 201 

Mrs.  Harriet  Prescott  Spofford 201 

Hon.  Robert  S.  Rantoul 202 

Judge  Robert  Grant 203 

Mrs.  Elizabeth  Stuart  Phelps  Ward 204 

Dr.  Edward  Everett  Hale 205 

Hon.  John  Hay 206 

Mrs.  James  T.  Fields  .  .  207 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE Frontispiece 

From  a  photograph. 

HAWTHORNE'S  PATH 2 

From  a  photograph  by  Herbert  W.  Gleason. 

UNVEILING  OF  THE  TABLET  BY  MISS  BEATRIX 

HAWTHORNE 12 

From  a  photograph  by  Herbert  W.  Gleason. 

THE  MEMORIAL  TABLET 26 

From  a  photograph  by  James  Tolman. 

THE  WAYSIDE 38 

From  a  photograph  by  Herbert  W.  Gleason. 

HAWTHORNE'S  STUDY  IN  THE  TOWER    .    .    .    .112 
From  a  photograph  by  Herbert  W.  Gleason. 

HAWTHORNE'S  PATH   (ON  THE   HILLTOP)    ...  148 
From  a  photograph  by  Herbert  W.  Gleason. 


FIRST  DAY 
JULY  FOURTH 


HAWTHORNE'S   PATH 
(Showing  The  Wayside  and  the  Boulder) 


FIRST  DAY 
JULY  FOURTH 

THE  exercises  were  held  at  The  Wayside,  in  the 
pine  grove  and  on  the  terraces.  The  large  audience 
sat  facing  Hawthorne's  favorite  path,  where  had 
been  placed,  between  two  pines,  a  granite  boulder, 
rough-hewn  and  massive,  as  it  came  from  Concord's 
soil.  The  bronze  tablet  inserted  in  its  face  was 
veiled  by  a  large  flag  hung  from  the  two  trees, 
completely  enveloping  the  boulder,  the  folds  of  the 
national  emblem  being  caught  up  with  branches  of 
laurel  and  pine. 

The  presiding  officer  of  the  day  was  Mr.  Thomas 
Wentworth  Higginson,  of  Cambridge. 

ADDKESS   OF   THOMAS   WENTWORTH   HIGGINSON 

LADIES  AND  GENTLEMEN  :  I  am  desired  to  intro 
duce  this  meeting,  the  object  of  which  is  a  further 
commemoration  of  one  of  our  two  great  American 
authors.  It  is  for  the  citizens  of  Concord,  in  the 
first  place,  to  rejoice  over  the  memory  of  Haw 
thorne  and  of  Emerson ;  while  those  born  elsewhere 
in  Middlesex  County  —  among  whom  I  myself  am 
happy  to  be  classed  —  may  also  rejoice  as  neigh 
bors.  I  learned  from  Worcester's  Geography  in 


4  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

my  youth,  and  was  much  impressed  by  the  discov 
ery,  that  in  Middlesex  County  in  Massachusetts 
there  were  two  half  shire  towns,  and  those  two 
towns  were  Concord  and  Cambridge.  Let  me 
speak  for  that  other  half  shire  town. 

No  o.ue  can  tell  how  it  is  that  great  authors  come 
in  pairs  —  come  in  doublets :  we  speak  of  Shake 
speare  and  Milton,  Homer  and  Virgil ;  but  it  is  a 
great  thing  if  they  are  willing  to  come  at  all,  and 
if  they  can  come  in  pairs,  so  much  the  better  for 
us !  Even  the  little  time  that  has  passed  since  the 
birth  of  these  two  great  men,  Emerson  and  Haw 
thorne,  has  so  tested  the  traditions  and  the  claims 
of  the  other  leading  authors  of  the  country  that 
we  can  already  admit,  without  a  blush,  —  wherever 
they  came  from,  —  the  leadership  that  is  commem 
orated  in  Concord  by  these  two  memorial  meetings 
coming  at  so  short  an  interval.  While  they  were 
writing,  what  multitudes  of  other  men  seemed  great, 
sometimes  as  great  as  they  ;  now  that  they  have  writ 
ten,  what  multitudes  of  those  other  men  seem  small, 
or  are  forgotten !  And  we  who  live  and  live  to  write 

O 

—  write  because  we  cannot  help  it  —  must  go  on 
writing  because  we  cannot  get  our  bread  and  but 
ter  without  it,  or  perhaps  even  because  we  cannot 
quite  get  that  provision  with  it. 

Such  gatherings  as  these  are  for  those  who  can 
claim  something  more  than  that.  I  forget  what 
English  noblemen  it  was  —  Mr.  Con  way  is  here 


THE  WAYSIDE  6 

and  can  tell  us  by  and  by,  and  if  lie  cannot  give  us 
the  right  names,  he  can  give  us  the  wrong  ones, 
which  is  the  next  best  thing  to  it  —  I  forget 
what  two  it  was  in  the  East  Indies  who  went  out 
shooting  with  a  native  or  whatever  they  call  him 
to  guide  them.  They  came  home  at  last  without 
any  especially  visible  result  from  their  afternoon's 
sport,  and  the  basha  bora  or  basha  pasha,  or  what 
ever  it  was  —  this  man  who  went  with  them  —  said 
in  his  gracious  Eastern  way  that  the  two  English 
noblemen  shot  to  admiration,  but  it  pleased  the 
Almighty  to  be  very  gracious  that  day  to  the  birds ! 
We  who  shoot  after  fame  have  to  accept  that  as 
our  probable  result,  and  it  is  fortunate  that,  as  it 
is  so,  there  stand  here  before  us  two  permanent 
names,  and  we  are  to  pay  our  tribute  to  those. 

The  more  serious  part  of  my  little  tribute  I  have 
written  down,  —  it  is  always  the  worst  part,  —  but 
if  you  saw,  as  I  do,  hands  going  up  behind  ears, 
and  saw  what  a  dreadful  position  this  really  is  to 
speak  from,  —  to  have  to  speak  against  the  wind, 
—  not  only  of  coming  fame,  but  of  actual  Concord, 
you  would  have  more  sympathy  with  me  than  you 
probably  do. 

Perhaps  it  always  appears  to  men,  as  they  grow 
older,  that  there  was  rather  more  of  positive  force 
and  vitality  in  their  own  generation  and  among  their 
immediate  predecessors  than  among  those  left  on 


6  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

the  stage.  I  do  not  know  when  I  have  been  more 
surprised,  for  instance,  than  on  being  once  asked 
whether  Hawthorne  was  not  physically  very  small. 
It  seemed  at  the  moment  utterly  inconceivable  that 
he  should  have  been  anything  less  than  the  sombre 
and  commanding  personage  he  was.  Ellery  Chan- 
ning  well  describes  him  as  a 

"  Tall,  compacted  figure,  ably  strung, 
To  urge  the  Indian  chase  or  point  the  way." 

One  can  imagine  any  amount  of  visible  energy  — 
that  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  for  instance  —  as  in 
cluded  within  a  small  physical  frame.  But  the  self- 
contained  purpose  of  Hawthorne,  the  large  resources, 
the  waiting  power,  —  these  seem  to  the  imagination 
to  imply  an  ample  basis  of  physical  life  ;  and  cer 
tainly  his  stately  and  noble  port  is  inseparable  in 
my  memory  from  these  characteristics. 

The  actual  Hawthorne  was  five  feet  ten  and  one 
half  inches  high,  broad,  but  of  light  athletic  build, 
weighing  one  hundred  and  fifty  pounds.  His  eyes 
were  large,  dark,  and  brilliant,  as  his  son  tells  us. 
Bayard  Taylor  said  that  they  were  the  only  ones 
he  had  seen  that  really  flashed  fire.  Charles  Keade 
said  he  never  saw  such  in  human  head.  People  in 
London  compared  him  to  Burns,  while  in  college  an 
old  gypsy  woman  asked  him,  "  Are  you  a  man  or 
an  angel  ?  " 

Vivid  as  this  impression  is,  I  yet  saw  him  but 
twice,  and  never  spoke  to  him.  I  first  met  him  on 


THE  WAYSIDE  7 

a  summer  morning  in  Concord,  as  he  was  walking 
along  the  road  near  the  Old  Manse,  with  his  wife 
by  his  side,  and  a  noble-looking  baby-boy  in  a  little 
wagon  which  the  father  was  pushing.  I  remember 
him  as  tall,  firm,  and  strong  in  bearing ;  his  wife 
looked  pensive  and  dreamy,  as  she  indeed  was,  then 
and  always ;  the  child  Julian,  then  known  among 
the  neighbors  as  "the  Prince."  When  I  passed, 
Hawthorne  lifted  upon  me  his  great  gray  eyes,  with 
a  look  too  keen  to  seem  indifferent,  too  shy  to  be 
sympathetic  —  and  that  was  all.  But  it  comes  back 
to  memory  like  that  one  glimpse  of  Shelley  which 
Browning  describes,  and  which  he  likens  to  the  day 
when  he  found  an  eagle's  feather. 

Again  I  met  Hawthorne  at  one  of  the  sessions 
of  a  short-lived  literary  club  ;  and  I  recall  the  im 
perturbable  dignity  and  patience  with  which  he  sat 
through  a  vexatious  discussion,  whose  details  seemed 
as  much  dwarfed  by  his  presence  as  if  he  had  been 
a  statue  of  Olympian  Zeus.  After  his  death  I  had 
a  brief  but  intimate  acquaintance  with  that  rare 
person,  Mrs.  Hawthorne ;  and  with  one  still  more 
finely  organized,  and  born  to  a  destiny  of  sadness, 
—  their  elder  daughter.  I  have  stayed  at  "The 
Wayside,"  occupying  a  room  in  the  small  tower  built 
by  Hawthorne,  and  containing  his  lofty  and  then 
deserted  study,  which  still  bore  upon  its  wall  the 
Tennysonian  motto,  "  There  is  no  joy  but  calm,"  — 
this  having  been  inscribed,  however,  not  by  him- 


8  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

self,  but  by  his  son.  But  I  do  not  want  to  dwell 
upon  these  things.  Hawthorne  had  what  Emerson 
once  described  as  "  the  still  living  merit  of  the  old 
est  New-England  families  ;  "  he  had,  moreover,  the 
unexhausted  wealth  of  the  Puritan  traditions,  — 
a  wealth  to  which  only  he  and  Whittier  have  as 
yet  done  any  justice.  The  value  of  the  material  to 
be  found  in  contemporary  American  life  he  did 
not  always  recognize  ;  but  he  was  the  first  person 
to  see  that  we  truly  have,  for  romantic  purposes, 
a  past;  those  hundred  years  being  really  quite 
enough  to  constitute  antiquity.  This  was  what  his 
"  environment  "  gave  him,  and  this  was  much. 

But,  after  all,  his  artistic  standard  was  his  own ; 
there  was  nobody  except  Irving  to  teach  him  any 
thing  in  that  way ;  and  Irving's  work  lay  rather  on 
the  surface,  and  could  be  no  model  for  Hawthorne's. 
Yet  from  the  time  when  the  latter  began  to  write 
for  "  The  Token,"  at  twenty-three,  his  powers  of 
execution,  as  of  thought,  appear  to  have  been  full 
grown.  The  quiet  ease  is  there,  the  pellucid  lan 
guage,  the  haunting  quality :  these  gifts  were  born 
in  him ;  we  cannot  trace  them  back  to  any  period 
of  formation.  And  when  we  consider  the  degree  to 
which  they  were  developed,  how  utterly  unfilled 
remains  his  peculiar  throne  ;  how  powerless  would 
be  the  accumulated  literary  forces  of  London,  for 
instance,  at  this  day,  to  produce  a  single  page  that 
could  possibly  be  taken  for  Hawthorne's ;  —  we  see 


THE  WAYSIDE  9 

that  there  must,  after  all,  be  such  a  thing  as  lit 
erary  art,  and  that  he  must  represent  one  of  the 
very  highest  types  of  artist. 

Through  Hawthorne's  journals  we  trace  the 
mental  impulses  by  which  he  first  obtained  his 
themes.  Then  in  his  unfinished  "  Septimius  Fel- 
ton  " — fortunately  unfinished  for  this  purpose — we 
see  his  plastic  imagination  at  work  in  shaping  the 
romance ;  we  watch  him  trying  one  mode  of  treat 
ment,  then  modifying  it  by  another ;  always  aim 
ing  at  the  main  point,  but  sometimes  pausing  to 
elaborate  the  details,  and  at  other  times  dismissing 
them  to  be  worked  out  at  leisure.  There  hangs 
before  me,  in  my  study,  a  photograph  of  one  of 
Raphael's  rough  sketches,  drawn  on  the  back  of 
a  letter :  there  is  a  group  of  heads,  then  another 
group  drawn  on  a  very  different  scale  ;  you  follow 
the  shifting  mood  of  the  artist's  mind ;  and  so  it  is 
in  reading  "  Septimius  Felton."  But  in  all  Haw 
thorne's  completed  works,  the  penciling  is  rubbed 
out,  and  every  trace  of  the  preliminary  labor  has 
disappeared. 

One  of  the  most  characteristic  of  Hawthorne's 
literary  methods  is  his  habitual  use  of  guarded 
under-statements  and  veiled  hints.  It  is  not  a  sign 
of  weakness,  but  of  conscious  strength,  when  he 
surrounds  each  delineation  with  a  sort  of  penum 
bra,  takes  you  into  his  counsels,  offers  hypotheses, 
as,  "  May  it  not  have  been  ?  "  or,  "  Shall  we  not 


10  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

rather  say  ?  "  and  sometimes,  like  a  conjurer,  urges 
particularly  upon  you  the  card  he  does  not  intend 
you  to  accept.  He  seems  not  quite  to  know  whether 
Arthur  Dimmesdale  really  had  a  fiery  scar  on  his 
breast,  or  what  finally  became  of  Miriam  and  her 
lover.  He  will  gladly  share  with  you  any  informa 
tion  he  possesses  (nothing  mean  about  him !  he 
would  not  keep  back  anything  for  the  world!), 
and,  indeed,  he  has  several  valuable  hints  to  offer ; 
but  that  is  all.  The  result  is,  that  you  place  your 
self  by  his  side  to  look  with  him  at  his  characters, 
and  gradually  share  with  him  the  conviction  that 
they  must  be  real.  Then,  when  he  has  you  thus 
in  possession,  he  calls  your  attention  to  the  pro 
found  ethics  involved  in  the  tale,  and  yet  does  it  so 
gently  that  you  never  think  of  the  moral  as  being 
obtrusive. 

All  this  involved  a  trait  which  was  always  su 
preme  in  him,  —  a  marvelous  self-control.  He  had 
by  nature  that  gift  which  the  musical  composer 
Jomelli  went  to  a  teacher  to  seek,  —  "  the  art  of 
not  being  embarrassed  by  his  own  ideas."  Mrs. 
Hawthorne  told  me  that  her  husband  grappled 
alone  all  winter  with  "  The  Scarlet  Letter,"  and 
came  daily  from  his  study  with  a  knot  in  his  fore 
head  ;  and  yet  his  self-mastery  was  so  complete 
that  every  sentence  would  seem  to  have  crystallized 
in  an  atmosphere  of  perfect  calm.  We  see  the  value 
of  this  element  in  his  literary  execution,  when  we 


THE   WAYSIDE  11 

turn  from  it  to  that  of  an  author  so  great  as  Lowell, 
for  instance,  and  see  him  often  entangled  and 
weighed  down  by  his  own  rich  thoughts,  his  style 
being  overcrowded  by  the  very  wealth  it  bears. 
Hawthorne  never  needed  italic  letters  to  distribute 
his  emphasis,  never  a  footnote  for  assistance.  There 
was  no  conception  so  daring  that  he  shrank  from 
attempting  it ;  and  none  that  he  could  not  so  mas 
ter  as  to  state  it,  if  he  pleased,  in  terms  of  mono 
syllables. 

Having  so  much,  why  should  we  ask  for  more  ? 
An  immediate  popularity  might  possibly  have  added 
a  little  more  sunshine  to  his  thought,  a  few  drops 
of  redder  blood  to  his  style  ;  thus  averting  the  only 
criticism  that  can  ever  be  justly  made  on  either. 
Yet  this  very  privation  has  made  him  a  nobler  and 
tenderer  figure  in  literary  history  ;  and  a  source  of 
more  tonic  influence  for  young  writers,  through  all 
coming  time.  The  popular  impression  of  Hawthorne 
as  a  shy  and  lonely  man  gives  but  a  part  of  the 
truth.  When  we  think  of  him  as  reading  "The 
Scarlet  Letter  "  to  his  sympathetic  wife,  until  she 
pressed  her  hands  to  her  ears,  and  could  bear  no 
more ;  or  when  we  imagine  him  as  playing  with  his 
children  so  gayly  that  his  elder  daughter  told  me 
"  there  never  was  such  a  playmate  in  all  the  world," 
—  we  may  feel  that  he  had,  after  all,  the  very  best 
that  earth  can  give,  and  all  our  regrets  seem  only 
an  honest  impertinence. 


12  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

MR.  HIGGINSON  :  The  original  plan  of  the  meet 
ing  was  that  the  whole  proceedings  of  the  meeting 
should  take  place  this  afternoon  out  here.  It  has 
now  grown  so  very  breezy,  however,  that  it  would 
be  well,  after  the  unveiling  of  the  stone,  to  have 
the  later  proceedings  take  place  in  the  chapel, 
where  the  other  meetings  are  to  be. 

I  have  here  a  copy  of  the  inscription  on  the  tablet, 
and  I  will  say  that  we  are  honored  in  having  the 
first  look  at  it.  What  is  dearest  and  best  for  a 
man's  memory  is  always  unveiled,  if  possible,  by 
his  personal  posterity,  and  so  it  is  fitting  that  this 
tablet  should  be  unveiled  by  Hawthorne's  grand 
child.  If  she  will  kindly  do  this,  I  will  read  the 
inscription. 

(Miss  Beatrix  Hawthorne  then  unveiled  the 
tablet.) 

THIS  TABLET  PLACED 
AT  THE  CENTENNIAL  EXERCISES 

JULY  4, 1904 

COMMEMORATES  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
HE  TROD  DAILY  THIS  PATH  TO  THE  HILL 
TO  FORMULATE  « 

AS  HE  PACED  TO  AND  FRO 

UPON  ITS  SUMMIT 
HIS  MARVELOUS  ROMANCES 


UNVEILING   OF   THE   TABLET   BY   MISS   BEATRIX   HAWTHORNE 


THE   WAYSIDE  13 

ME.  HiGGiNSON:  It  is  proposed  that  the  meet 
ing  should  now  adjourn  to  the  Hillside  Chapel, 
which  is  so  well  known  in  Concord  that  you  merely 
have  to  shut  your  eyes  and  your  feet  will  take 
you  to  it!  An  opportunity  will  be  given  to  ex 
amine  the  inscription  first,  as  you  go  along,  if 
you  wish. 

(The  company  gathered  about  the  Tablet  and 
then  passed  on  to  Hillside  Chapel.) 

MK.  HIGGINSON  :  We  will  now  resume  our  pro 
ceedings,  and  as  we  last  saw  the  charming  spectacle 
of  one  of  Hawthorne's  race  removing  the  veil 
which  covered  the  inscription,  I  cannot  bear  not  to 
introduce  a  further  suggestion  of  that  race,  in  an 
earlier  generation.  I  have  not  with  me  the  paper  I 
published  this  week  in  the  "Outlook,"  upon  my 
dear  friend,  Una  Hawthorne,  the  oldest,  and  per 
haps  most  gifted,  of  the  daughters;  but  I  will 
bring  before  you  the  absent  image  of  the  younger 
daughter,  who  has  shown  herself  able  to  lead 
where  few  women  could  have  equaled  her ;  and  I 
will  ask  that  the  letter  of  Mrs.  Rose  Hawthorne 
Lathrop  be  read  by  the  daughter  of  our  hostess  of 
this  afternoon, 

(Miss  Margaret  Lothrop  then  read  the  letter.) 


14  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

LETTER    FROM   MRS.    ROSE   HAWTHORNE    LATHROP 
ROSARY  HILL  HOME,  HAWTHORNE,  N.  Y., 

June  9tli. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  Your  most  inter 
esting  letter  and  kind  invitation  have  just  reached 
me,  in  our  country  home  for  cancerous  poor.  I  am 
so  glad  that  you  are  all  to  gather  together  to  give 
my  father  so  much  honor.  But  I  have  no  prospect 
whatever  of  being  able  to  be  present.  I  have  tried 
very  hard  for  a  couple  of  years  to  leave  my  work 
among  the  poor,  to  go  to  Concord,  or  its  neighbor 
hood,  but  have  been  prevented  very  imperatively. 
This  is  usually  because  taking  care  of  the  dying, 
and  few  of  our  patients  living  beyond  expectation 
for  some  months  or  years,  we  are  constantly  thrown 
into  extremely  arduous  situations,  when  every  one 
must  join  in  watching,  laying  out  the  dead,  and 
seeing  to  the  last  rites ;  and,  too,  new  patients  are 
to  be  received,  which  entails  much  preliminary 
work,  until  they  are  refreshed  and  settled.  We  do 
all  our  housework  as  well.  When  I  have  more 
members  of  our  band  of  women  for  both  Homes, 
I  shall  expect  to  get  away  occasionally  for  jour 
neys  in  several  directions.  I  am  so  glad  that  my 
brother  will  be  present,  and  I  wish  with  all  my 
heart  that  I  could  be,  and  could  add  any  words 
of  interest  to  the  commemoration.  That,  however, 
I  could  not  do,  as  I  am  not  used  to  addresses, 


THE  WAYSIDE  15 

such  as  will  be  given.  But  I  am,  I  think,  a  good 
listener,  and  grieve  that  I  must  lose  the  interesting 
experience. 

Gratefully  and  cordially  your  servant, 

M.  ALPHONSA  LATHROP,  O.  S.  D. 

MR.  HIGGINSON  :  I  shall  now  have  the  honor  of 
introducing  to  you  as  the  next  speaker  of  the  after 
noon  a  gentleman  who,  although  comparatively 
young  in  years,  has  achieved  for  himself  the  high 
position  of  being  one  of  the  recognized  leaders  in 
the  teaching  of  English  literature  among  the  col 
leges  of  America.  So  far  as  Harvard  College  sus 
tains  the  high  position  which  it  has  long  maintained, 
it  has  never,  I  think,  had  a  tone  of  more  judicial 
and  critical  authority  on  all  matters  of  pure  litera 
ture  than  it  now  possesses,  and  the  fact  that  this 
inspires  a  profound  interest  among  the  students 
is  a  thing  to  which  I,  living  in  Cambridge,  can 
testify.  I  have  the  pleasure  of  introducing  as  one 
of  the  special  sources  of  that  peculiar  interest,  Mr. 
Charles  T.  Copeland,  instructor  in  English  litera 
ture  in  Harvard  University. 

ADDRESS   OF   CHARLES   T.   COPELAND 

I  am  very  much  ashamed  to  have  made  you  move 
from  that  grove,  but  it  was,  after  all,  a  whispering 
gallery,  and  when  you  had  no  longer  an  orator  to 
listen  to,  as  in  Colonel  Higginson,  and  only  a  teacher 


16  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

and  a  speaker  not  used  to  distinguished  occasions 
indoors  or  out,  it  seemed  to  me  you  might  not  be 
listening  to  me,  but  rather  to  the  pine-trees ;  so  I 
asked  Mrs.  Lothrop  to  arrange  the  move. 

If,  in  this  spare  summary  of  a  part  of  Haw 
thorne's  career,  which  —  by  the  way  —  might  be 
called,  "  From  Concord  to  Concord  in  Hawthorne's 
Life,"  the  student  of  biography  misses  much  of 
what  seems  to  him  important,  it  is  because  my  sole 
endeavor  has  been  to  point  the  relation  between 
the  author's  experience  and  his  work.  In  the  case 
of  this  particular  author,  the  difficulty  of  seeing 
the  man  is  only  less  than  that  of  seeing  the  artist. 
Yet  from  the  little  really  known  of  this  New  Eng- 
lander  of  genius,  a  few  illuminating  facts  easily  dis 
engage  themselves.  No  one  now  thinks  of  the  appar 
ent  connection  between  the  campaign  life  of  Pierce 
and  the  Liverpool  consulship  as  leaving  the  slight 
est  stain  upon  Hawthorne's  unblemished  honor  and 
manliness.  He  wrote  the  book  without  thought  of 
the  consulship,  to  do  his  best  for  his  friend.  And 
it  is  due  to  Pierce  —  although  not  one  of  the  most 
disinterested  persons  in  history  —  to  say  that  he 
would  have  done  his  best  for  Hawthorne  if  the 
book  had  never  been  written.  A  few  words  in  the 
"  Italian  Note-Books,"  more  touching  than  dithy 
rambs  for  print  or  from  a  more  self-expressing 
man,  sufficiently  exhibit  the  tenderness  of  Haw 
thorne's  life-long  affection  for  Pierce. 


THE  WAYSIDE  17 

A  devoted  son,  he  was  the  most  admirable  of 
fathers,  and  the  rare  sort  of  husband  who  remains 
a  lover.  Democratic,  though  conservative,  he  was 
far  enough  from  the  thorough-paced  reformer,  who 
too  often  takes  for  his  motto  that  whatever  is, 
is  wrong.  And  this  ingrained  habit  of  mind  con 
spired  with  loyalty  to  early  training  to  keep  a  son 
of  the  Puritans  from  ranging  himself  with  all 
other  American  writers  of  note,  "  on  the  side  of 
the  angels,"  in  the  burning  question  of  his  later 
years.  Hawthorne's  way  of  sticking  to  a  political 
position,  in  which  it  is  hard  to  visualize  a  Northern 
man  of  his  intellect,  is  subtly  explained,  it  may 
be,  by  Emerson's  constant  impression  of  a  strong 
feminine  element  in  his  friend,  and  by  Curtis's 
word  that  talking  to  Hawthorne  was  like  talking  to 
a  woman.  Neither  —  it  says  itself  —  doubted  for  a 
day  his  essential  manliness  :  both,  we  may  hazard, 
perceived  some  mingled  trait  of  mind  and  temper 
ament  on  which  Francisque  Sarcey  has  since  put 
his  finger  in  the  delphic  saying,  "  Every  artist  is  a 
woman."  But  being  an  artist  did  not  keep  Haw 
thorne  from  being  an  exemplar  of  his  own  fine  re 
mark,  apropos  of  Burns  and  Scottish  scenery,  that 
"  a  man  is  better  than  a  mountain."  People  made 
way  in  a  crowd  for  the  gentle  Titan,  without  his 
lifting  hand  or  voice.  Fields,  a  genius  among  pub 
lishers,  and  an  especially  good  genius  to  Haw 
thorne,  tells  of  him:  "  I  happened  to  be  in  London 


18  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

with  Hawthorne  during  his  consular  residence  in 
England,  and  was  always  greatly  delighted  at  the 
rustle  of  admiration  his  personal  appearance  ex 
cited  when  he  entered  a  room.  His  bearing  was 
modestly  grand,  and  his  voice  touched  the  ear  like 
a  melody."  Charles  Eeade  said  of  him,  using 
almost  exactly  Sir  Walter's  words  about  Burns, 
that  he  had  never  seen  such  an  eye  in  any  human 
head.  And  here  is  an  anecdote  communicated  to 
Mr.  Con  way  by  Dr.  Loring:  "Placid,  peaceful, 
calm,  and  retiring  as  he  was  in  all  the  ordinary 
events  of  life,  he  was  tempestuous  and  irresist 
ible  when  roused.  An  attempt  on  the  part  of  a 
rough  and  overbearing  sea  captain  to  interfere 
with  his  business  as  an  inspector  of  customs  in 
charge  of  his  ship,  was  met  with  such  a  terrific 
uprising  of  spiritual  and  physical  wrath,  that 
the  dismayed  captain  fled  up  the  wharf  and  took 
refuge  in  the  office,  inquiring,  'What  in  God's 
name  have  you  sent  on  board  my  ship  as  an  in 
spector  ? ' " 

In  truth,  neither  as  a  servant  of  the  public  nor 
as  master  of  himself,  did  Hawthorne  know  the 
name  of  fear.  He  loved  beauty  everywhere  in  Na 
ture  only  less  than  he  loved  it  in  fair  women.  He 
loved  books  —  in  youth,  particularly  Spenser  and 
Bunyan,  the  English  masters  of  allegory  ;  the  Bible 
throughout  his  life.  He  was  a  lover  of  flowers, 
pets,  the  sea,  friends,  family ;  yet,  whatever  else 


THE  WAYSIDE  19 

he  loved,  with  the  stern  probity  of  all  his  forbears 
he  loved  honor  more.  Churches,  parsons,  dinner 
parties,  literary  men  (as  a  class),  and  his  "  equals  " 
(as  a  rule)  appear  not  to  have  pleased  him ;  but 
he  was  at  his  ease  with  sea  captains,  cabin  boys, 
longshoremen,  children,  and  other  beings  who  come 
to  close  quarters  with  Nature  or  deal  with  her  at 
first  hand.  Most  persons  who  encountered  Haw 
thorne  had  poor  Mr.  Howells's  "  half  hour  of  si 
lence  "  with  him.  With  a  friend  or  two,  however, 
—  especially  with  a  sole  friend,  he  talked  beguil- 
ingly  and  much.  When  public  speaking  was  forced 
upon  him,  he  could,  though  often  shy  unto  death 
before  no  more  than  three  fellow  creatures,  wring 
triumph  from  the  occasion ;  and  there  are  memo 
rable  records  extant  of  these  successes  in  talk  with 
the  few  and  in  speech  to  the  many.  What  Haw 
thorne  got  from  his  life  may  be  known  from  what 
he  wrote  in  the  last  year  of  it  to  Mr.  R.  H.  Stod- 
dard,  on  receipt  of  that  writer's  verses,  entitled 
" The  King's  Bell : "  "I  sincerely  thank  you  for 
your  beautiful  poem,  which  I  have  read  with  a 
great  deal  of  pleasure.  It  is  such  as  the  public  had 
a  right  to  expect  from  what  you  gave  us  in  years 
gone  by ;  only  I  wish  the  idea  had  not  been  so  sad. 
I  think  Felix  might  have  rung  the  bell  once  in  his 
lifetime,  and  again  at  the  moment  of  death.  Yet 
you  may  be  right.  I  have  been  a  happy  man,  and 
yet  I  do  not  remember  any  one  moment  of  such 


20  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

happy  conspiring  circumstances  that  I  could  have 
rung  a  joy-bell  for  it." 

Here  is  a  fairly  complete  description.  Let  any 
painter  who  is  skilled  at  deriving  likenesses  from 
passports  evoke  a  speaking  likeness  of  the  person 
designated.  Or  let  some  magician  who  has  what  the 
stage  calls  a  "  practicable  "  cauldron,  set  it  over 
the  fire  of  his  imagination,  stir  together  in  it  these 
diverse  elements  of  identity,  and  bid  an  apparition 
rise.  The  shadow  is  as  likely  to  be  Banquo  as  to  be 
Hawthorne,  and  however  good  the  charm,  will  be 
no  more  keenly  limned  than  the  remembrance  of  a 
dream  of  one  whom  we  have  never  known.  Haw 
thorne  unconsciously  mystified  all  but  a  very  few 
of  those  who  thought  they  understood  him  best ; 
and  even  in  the  case  of  those  few  —  such  were  his 
honest  evasions,  so  undesignedly  elusive  was  he  — • 
we  cannot  be  sure  that  they  perceived  more  than 
a  certain  phasis  of  the  man  who  charmed  them,  or 
that  they  really  knew  more  of  him  than  Kenyon 
knew  of  Donatello.  He  had  the  strangest  and,  on 
the  whole,  I  think,  the  most  original  imagination 
of  his  day,  in  any  language.  That  the  possessor  — 
or  the  possessed  —  of  such  an  imagination  could 
harness  himself  to  his  heavy  load  in  custom  house 
and  consulate,  is  only  a  heightening  of  the  recur 
rent  miracle  which  binds  artist  and  man  in  one 
body.  It  would  have  been  a  more  wonderful  mir 
acle  than  ever  yet  was  worked,  if  Hawthorne's 


THE  WAYSIDE  21 

creating  mind  had  not  often  strayed,  even  from 
those  close  at  hand  and  heart,  to  the  phantoms 
that  "  startle  and  waylay  "  his  readers.  Like  every 
rare  being  that  walks  this  earth  awhile,  he  seemed 
to  keep  step  to  a  march  very  different  indeed  from 
the  treadmill  measure  that  sets  the  pace  for  poor 
humanity.  And  when  the  baser  rhythm  broke  in 
upon  the  airy  music  to  which  his  feet  kept  time, 
he  lost  the  beat,  and,  perforce,  fell  out.  Consule 
Hawthorne,  there  were  no  romances. 

MR.  HIGGINSON  :  After  this  charming  tribute  by 
a  critic  we  should  like,  I  think,  a  little  direct  testi 
monial  from  a  contemporary  of  Hawthorne's,  or  a 
younger  contemporary  in  the  world  of  poetry,  and 
I  will  ask  one  of  the  young  gentlemen  who  have 
kindly  offered  to  assist  us,  when  our  own  voices 
gave  out,  if  he  will  read  a  letter  received  from 
Mr.  Stedman,  the  well-known  New  York  poet  and 
critic  as  well. 

(Mr.  Charles  Everett  then  read  the  following 
letter.) 

LETTER  FROM  MR.  EDMUND   CLARENCE   STEDMAN 

LAWRENCE  PARK,  BRONXVILLE,  N.  Y., 
June  26,  1904. 

MRS.  H.  M.  LOTHROP,  The  Wayside,  Concord. 

MY  DEAR  MADAM:  When  your  letter  of  the 
20th  came,  I  was  ill  with  a  fever,  and  I  am  to-day 


22  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

for  the  first  time  able  to  write  you.  Meanwhile,  I 
now  have  received  your  second  letter,  and  very  much 
regret  that  it  will  be  impossible  for  me  —  in  my 
rather  helpless  state  —  to  go  to  grand  old  Concord 
and  reverently  listen  to  the  tributes  paid  to  the 
memory  of  New  England's  great  romancer  and 
literary  artist,  at  the  spot  where  he  wrote  "  The 
Blithedale  Romance,"  and  where  he  rode  so  well, 
as  Emerson  said,  his  "  horse  of  the  night."  None 
of  the  Concord  Pleiad  was  more  distinctive  than 
he,  for  he  was  among  them,  yet  not  wholly  of 
them.  Yet,  like  each  of  them,  though  following 
the  line  of  mystery  and  beauty,  he  was  a  moralist 
ingrained.  I  am  glad  to  be  remembered  at  Con 
cord,  where  my  personal  associations  were  so  brief 
that  the  memory  of  them  is  all  the  more  precious. 
There  I  lived  for  a  day  and  night  at  "  The  Yfay- 
side,"  the  guest  of  Hawthorne's  daughter  and  her 
husband.  There,  I  know,  Sanborn  piously  still 
keeps  burning  the  sacred  lamp  —  faithful  to  the 
manes  of  the  departed  bards  and  seers.  And  Hig- 
ginson,  too,  is  left,  to  lead  your  exercises  —  and  my 
picture  of  the  Hillside  Chapel,  now  before  me  as  I 
write,  is  not  so  vivid  as  that  which  my  mind  con 
ceives  of  the  little  platform  as  it  will  appear  on  In 
dependence  Day.  I  hoped  to  write  this  note  before 
you  would  receive  the  little  volume  with  the  Haw 
thorne  poem.  It  was  mailed  to  you  to  show  that  I 
had  already  paid  the  fullest  metrical  tribute  within 


THE  WAYSIDE  23 

my  power  to  the  genius  of  Hawthorne,  and  that  I 
could  not  write  another  poein  upon  its  theme  — 
even  if  you  had  given  me  more  than  ten  days'  no 
tice.  For  the  same  reason,  a  month  ago,  I  received 
similar  requests  from  Salem  and  from  Bowdoin. 
But  if  I  had  had  my  choice  where  to  go,  as  one  of 
a  reverent  gathering,  it  would  have  been  to  Con 
cord,  and  it  is  a  deprivation  that  I  cannot  be  with 
you  on  the  Fourth. 

Very  truly  yours, 

EDMUND  C.  STEDMAN. 

MR.  HIGGINSON  :  I  think  it  is  only  just  to  Mr. 
Stedman  and  to  Mr.  Hawthorne  to  call  your  atten 
tion  to  a  poem  by  the  one  upon  the  other,  which 
Mr.  Stedman  read  before  the  Society  of  the  Phi 
Beta  Kappa,  at  Harvard  University,  in  1877,  and 
some  of  his  touches  seem  to  me  so  singularly  fine 
that  I  am  sure  you  will  pardon  me  if  I  read  you  two 
or  three  stanzas  from  that.  He  says  of  Hawthorne  : 

"  Two  natures  in  him  strove 
Like  day  with  night,  his  sunshine  and  his  gloom. 

To  him  the  stern  forefathers'  creed  descended, 
The  weight  of  some  inexorable  Jove 
Prejudging  from  the  cradle  to  the  tomb; 

But  therewithal  the  lightsome  laughter  blended 
Of  that  Arcadian  sweetness  undismayed 

Which  finds  in  Love  its  law,  and  graces  still 
The  rood,  the  penitential  symbol  worn,  — 
Which  sees,  beyond  the  shade, 


24  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

The  Naiad  nymph  of  every  rippling  rill, 
And  hears  quick  Fancy  wind  her  willful  horn. 


"  What  if  he  brooded  long 
On  Time  and  Fate,  —  the  ominous  progression 

Of  years  that  with  Man's  retributions  frown,  — 
The  destinies  which  round  his  footsteps  throng,  — 
Justice,  that  heeds  not  Mercy's  intercession,  — 

Crime,  on  its  own  head  calling  vengeance  down,  — 
Deaf  Chance  and  blind,  that,  like  the  mountain-slide, 

Puts  out  Youth's  heart  of  fire  and  all  is  dark  ! 
What  though  the  blemish  which,  in  aught  of  earth, 
The  maker's  hand  defied, 

Was  plain  to  him,  —  the  one  evasive  mark 

Wherewith  Death  stamps  us  for  his  own  at  birth  ! 

"  Ah,  none  the  less  we  know 
He  felt  the  imperceptible  fine  thrill 

With  which  the  waves  of  being  palpitate, 
Whether  in  ecstasy  of  joy  or  woe, 
And  saw  the  strong  divinity  of  Will 

Bringing  to  halt  the  stolid  tramp  of  Fate; 
Nor  from  his  work  was  ever  absent  quite 

The  presence  which,  o'ercast  it  as  we  may, 
Things  far  beyond  our  reason  can  suggest: 
There  was  a  drifting  light 

In  Donatello's  cell,  —  a  fitful  ray 

Of  sunshine  came  to  hapless  Clifford's  breast." 

It  is  a  pleasure  to  feel  that  while  Hawthorne  him 
self  used  the  vehicle  of  prose  to  bring  his  deep 
rich  thought  to  so  high  a  point  of  utterance,  it  also 
was  echoed  in  a  manner  by  a  contemporary,  and 


THE   WAYSIDE  25 

by  one  of  the  highest,  certainly  among  the  younger 
contemporaries,  and  to  give  strains  so  rich  and 
delicate  as  those. 

Friends,  we  have  had  a  pleasant  afternoon. 
There  are  some  things  about  it,  at  any  rate,  that 
have  been  pleasant.  My  sympathy  still  goes  out  to 
those  hapless  beings  whom  I  saw  converting  the 
human  hand  into  an  ear-trumpet,  in  the  grove,  and 
I  know  that  it  will  gratify  you  if  I  say  we  have 
no  further  literary  tribute  this  afternoon,  whatever 
to-morrow  may  bring  forth,  —  you  need  not  think 
you  have  got  through  with  us.  I  am  authorized  by 
our  kind  hostess  [Mrs.  Daniel  Lothrop]  of  to-day 
to  say  what  she  herself  would  gladly  have  said  be 
fore  we  left  the  Hawthorne  house,  —  but  I  am  glad 
she  did  not,  for  if  she  had  we  should  have  wished 
to  accept  her  invitation,  —  that  she  would  be  very 
glad  if  there  are  any  here  who  have  never  happened 
before  to  be  in  the  neighborhood  of  that  historic 
mansion,  and  would  like  to  go  over  it  and  through 
it ;  if  any  of  the  company  would  like  to  do  that  this 
afternoon,  and  will  take  the  trouble  to  walk  the 
short  distance  back,  that  opportunity  will  now  be 
given. 

For  the  meeting  to-morrow  I  have  only  to  say 
it  will  be  held  here  at  ten  o'clock.  There  will  be 
morning  meetings  only,  but  they  will  turn  our  morn 
ings  into  such  pleasure  that  it  will  seem  always 
afternoon.  I  will  mention  the  speakers  for  to- 


26  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

morrow.  A  paper  by  Mr.  Julian  Hawthorne  will 
be  read,  he  having  been  prevented  by  circumstances 
from  attending.  Mrs.  Julia  Ward  Howe  will 
speak,  and  Hon.  Charles  Francis  Adams  will  also 
speak,  and  such  a  combination  as  that  I  think  will 
draw  us  all  here. 

This  meeting  is  adjourned. 


THE   MEMORIAL   TABLET 


SECOND  DAY 

JULY  FIFTH 


SECOND  DAY 

JULY  FIFTH 

THE  exercises  of  the  second  day  were  held  at 
Hillside  Chapel,  Mr.  Moncure  D.  Con  way  presiding. 
His  opening  remarks  were  as  follows :  — 

LADIES  AND  GENTLEMEN  :  The  eventualities  of 
life  have  brought  wonderful  changes.  Fifty  years 
ago  he  who  was  a  crude  young  Virginian,  born 
down  on  a  farm  adjacent  to  the  Washington  one, 
and  who  had  spent  his  early  life  devouring  all  the 
cherries  on  the  Washington  farm  that  Washing 
ton  had  spared,  was  brought  here,  summoned  by  the 
literature  of  Concord,  awakened  from  his  slumber 
in  old  Virginia,  and  now  has  the  honor  of  presid 
ing  at  a  meeting  and  in  the  presence  of  literary 
people  who  are  classic  to  all  of  us. 

You  may  be  sure  that  I  do  not  intend  to  take 
up  your  time  by  any  remarks  of  mine,  and  shall 
during  this  fitful  fete,  which  the  generosity,  tact, 
and  exquisite  taste  of  Mrs.  Lothrop  have  enabled 
us  to  enjoy  on  this  centennial  —  I  shall  have  my 
chance  to  say  my  say  to-morrow,  and  at  present 
shall  only  have  the  very  grateful  privilege  of  in 
troducing  my  friend,  Mrs.  Howe.  I  have  known 
her,  I  may  say,  all  my  life  —  that  is,  I  may  say  all 


30  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

my  spiritual  and  intellectual  life;  I  have  known 
her  as  you  have  known  her,  as  the  guide  and  in- 
spirer  of  our  earnestness  in  days  of  storm  and 
stress.  I  therefore  shall  simply  for  the  present  try 
to  efface  myself  as  chairman,  and  introduce  to  you 
our  beloved  and  noble  JULIA  WARD  HOWE,  who 
will  address  us  on  "The  World  in  which  Haw 
thorne  lived." 

ADDRESS   OF  MRS.   JULIA  WARD  HOWE 

MR.  PRESIDENT  AND  DEAR  FRIENDS  :  I  will  say 
what  I  can  to-day  about  the  world  in  which  Haw 
thorne  lived.  I  shall  ask  your  permission  to  remain 
seated. 

Much  has  been  written,  and  mostly  mis-written, 
regarding  Hawthorne's  social  surroundings.  Mr. 
Henry  James,  who  supposed  Salem  to  have  been 
for  such  a  man  "  the  abomination  of  desolation," 
was  evidently  not  well  versed  in  the  history  of  the 
ancient  town,  the  town  of  the  Devereux  and  Crown- 
inshields,  Silsbees  and  Peabodys,  very  prosperous 
before  the  day  when  Old  Billy  Gray  quarreled 
with  its  selectmen,  and  carried  its  business  to 
Boston. 

Captain  Hathorne,  the  father  of  the  great  ro 
mancer,  died  of  fever  in  a  foreign  land.  His  widow, 
unable  to  withstand  the  weight  of  her  sorrow,  se 
cluded  herself  even  from  her  family,  and  ate  her 
bread  in  the  solitude  of  her  own  room.  Her  home 


THE  WAYSIDE  31 

then  afforded  but  a  sombre  background  for  the 
life  picture  of  her  young  son  and  daughters.  It 
is  said  that  Hawthorne  once,  speaking  of  him 
self  and  his  sister,  said,  "  We  have  been  frozen 
together." 

The  Salem  of  that  time  had  society  enough  of 
the  usual  sort,  youths  and  maidens,  lordly  seniors 
and  stately  dames.  But  it  was  not  among  this 
goodly  company  that  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  lived 
and  moved.  In  a  weird  atmosphere  of  his  own, 
his  imagination  shaped  and  draped  the  companions 
of  his  early  manhood. 

In  the  heart  of  Boston  he  erects  a  pillory, 
whereon,  in  the  blazing  heat  of  the  summer  after 
noon,  stands  Hester  Prynne,  with  her  babe  on  her 
arm,  a  living  monument  of  shame  and  disgrace. 
There,  at  a  corner  of  the  street,  suddenly  appears 
her  husband,  spellbound  with  horror,  a  prey  to 
heat  more  fierce  than  that  of  the  summer  sun. 
Hidden  on  the  breast  of  the  saintly  young  minister 
burns  the  red  letter  which  matches  that  fastened 
upon  the  partner  of  his  offense. 

How  palpitating  with  life  are  the  personages  of 
this  romance !  Even  the  young  minister's  youthful 
catechumen,  who,  encountering  him  in  a  moment  of 
unconcealed  discomfort,  fancies  that  she  has  done 
him  some  offense,  her  conscience  being,  like  her 
workbag,  full  of  harmless  little  articles.  Even  the 
ancient  dame  who  openly  cherishes  her  familiar 


32  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

spirits,  and  dreams  of  whirling  in  the  dance  with 
a  wizard  from  Lapland.  It  all  hangs  together,  is  a 
region  of  imagination  all  compact,  and  those  who 
people  it  walk  logically  to  the  crisis  of  their  fate ; 
the  head  criminal  to  agonized  confession,  the  inno 
cent  child  to  a  calm  and  happy  career,  the  dis 
credited  mother  to  who  shall  say  what  lonely  and 
unconsoling  penitence  ? 

And  out  of  all  Salem's  stately  mansions  he  shows 
the  one  he  can  best  fill  with  the  nebulous  luminous 
atmosphere  which  seemed  to  be  his  true  element. 
Here  crime  and  cruelty  have  the  upper  hand,  but 
the  weird  touch  also  is  present.  Alice's  posies 
blossom  on  the  housetop,  while  she,  the  hapless 
maiden,  comes  and  goes  in  unwilling  obedience  to 
a  force  which  she  cannot  understand,  the  compell 
ing  will  of  the  man  whose  suit  she  has  rejected 
and  who  thenceforth  hunts  her  after  this  fashion. 

"  Ooelum  non  animum  mutant  qui  trans  mare 
currunt"  Hawthorne  goes  to  Italy,  and  sojourns 
there  long  enough  to  become  penetrated  with  the 
charm  of  that  lovely  land.  But  even  there  he  is  so 
far  master  of  the  situation  as  to  make  the  sculptor 
of  ancient  Greece  his  tributary,  and  endue  the 
fame  of  Praxiteles  with  a  life  of  his  own. 

Art  criticism  is  not  his  forte.  He  contemns 
Crawford  and  admires  without  stint  Miss  Hosmer 
and  Mr.  Story.  But  what  a  throne  does  his  fancy 
build  for  us  !  Fair  Hilda  with  her  doves  is  his  ideal 


THE  WAYSIDE  33 

of  maiden  innocence.  Miriam  is  the  glorious  guilty 
woman  of  passion  and  impulse  who  also  belongs  to 
his  artistic  family.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  crime  goes 
to  its  bitter  end.  From  this  Hawthorne  saw  no 
escape.  But  what  a  wonderful  light  has  he  thrown 
upon  the  details  of  the  eternal  city !  The  grim, 
gloomy  catacombs,  the  Capuchin  Convent,  the  mag 
nificent  church  itself,  a  world  wonder,  all  come  into 
position  at  his  bidding,  and  form  a  life  picture 
never  to  be  forgotten. 

Undoubtedly,  the  time  in  which  Hawthorne  pro 
duced  his  most  important  works  was  one  of  deep 
moral  and  religious  questioning.  The  cast-iron 
Puritan  rule  involved  so  much  that  was  not  in  ac 
cordance  with  man's  noblest  nature,  that  a  rebellion 
and  readjustment  of  moral  values  was  imperatively 
called  for.  With  the  doubt  of  religious  dogma  came 
to  many  minds  doubts  regarding  the  true  interpre 
tation  of  the  moral  law.  With  the  polemic  contro 
versies  of  the  hour  Hawthorne  gave  himself  little 
concern.  Were  there  not  Parker,  Phillips,  Gar 
rison  to  fight  the  real  battle  of  ethics?  Yet  our 
friend  in  his  opaline  mirror  made  show  of  the  evils 
which  could  lurk  beneath  the  cloak  of  outward 
sanctity,  of  the  dire  temptation  which  could  even 
assail  a  man  of  saintly  disposition.  The  deep 
pathos  and  instruction  of  this  portrayal  are  beyond 
words. 

The  bud  of  the  new  order  did  indeed  have  a 


34  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

bitter  taste.  The  tides  in  opposition  ran  high,  and 
wrecked  much  casual  fellowship,  perhaps  some 
friendships  which  had  been  accounted  real.  Bro 
ther  lifted  up  his  voice  against  brother.  The  fa 
thers  of  the  church  were  unfatherly  to  its  younger 
sons.  Parker  was  Anathema  Maranatha ;  the 
same  bitterness  may  have  been  felt  when  Haw 
thorne  wrote  a  life  of  Frank  Pierce.  But  the  bud 
had  to  unfold.  I  think  that  it  fulfilled  Cowper's 
prophecy, 

"  The  bud  may  have  a  bitter  taste, 
But  sweet  will  be  the  flower." 

I  remember  my  own  first  knowledge  of  this  great 
author.  I  was  not  out  of  my  teens  when  an  admiring 
elder  read  me  the  strange  story  of  the  minister's 
black  veil.  Although  I  honored  the  fine  reserve  of 
the  lady  who  declined  to  withdraw  the  veil  from 
the  face  after  death,  I  could  not  help  wishing  that 
she  had  withdrawn  it,  so  strong  is  curiosity  in  the 
daughters  of  Eve.  In  those  days  I  heard  that  a 
Miss  Peabody  had  made  a  drawing  illustrating 
Hawthorne's  story  of  the  Gentle  Boy.  When, 
years  afterwards,  I  heard  that  Hawthorne  had 
married  this  same  Miss  Peabody,  it  did  not  seem 
strange. 

Allow  me  one  more  glimpse  of  the  Hawthorne 
family.  On  a  Fourth  of  July  in  the  late  forties,  I 
had  gone  with  Dr.  Howe  and  a  lady  friend  to  see 
the  display  of  fireworks  on  Boston  Common.  The 


THE  WAYSIDE  35 

lady  friend  fainted,  and  Dr.  Howe  carried  her  into 
the  historic  West  Street  house  where  the  Peabodys 
still  abode.  The  grandmother  received  us,  holding 
in  her  arms  a  beautiful  boy  baby,  perhaps  eighteen 
months  of  age.  He  was  struggling  and  crying  vo 
ciferously.  The  grandame  explained  that  the  young 
people  had  gone  to  see  the  fireworks,  and  that  she 
was  doing  her  best  to  quiet  their  son.  And  this 
baby  was  Julian  Hawthorne. 

Hawthorne  does  much  to  redeem  our  literature 
from  the  charge  brought  against  it  in  recent  days, 
namely,  that  it  mostly  follows  the  trend  of  old  world 
culture,  and  contributes  to  the  world's  knowledge 
little  which  may  be  called  distinctively  American. 
Our  critics  on  the  other  side  perhaps  forget  that 
the  great  inheritance  of  the  English  tongue  natu 
rally  brings  with  it  many  of  the  traditions  handed 
down  in  its  literature.  And  yet,  methinks,  the 
criticism  just  cited  has  little  foundation.  To  go  as 
far  back  as  Washington  Irving' s  Knickerbocker, 
we  have  a  work  which  could  hardly  have  been 
produced  elsewhere  than  in  New  York.  His  tales 
of  Kip  Van  Winkle  and  Sleepy  Hollow  are  full  of 
the  atmosphere  of  the  region  to  which  they  are 
assigned.  Time  would  fail  me  to  follow  this  vein 
further,  but  I  cannot  but  remember  Tom  Apple- 
ton's  saying  that  in  Mr.  Emerson's  pages  you  have 
the  music  of  the  pines.  Cooper  has  preserved  for 
us  the  romance  of  the  early  hunters  and  pioneers, 


36  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

Bret  Harte  has  given  to  us  pictures  of  California 
life  which  will  live.  But  Hawthorne  in  his  writ 
ings  shows  himself  above  all  a  child  of  the  new 
world.  The  thrill  of  the  tales  that  fascinated  his 
childhood  follows  him  in  his  mature  manhood.  He 
makes  us  believe  what  he  himself  believed  in  his 
nursery. 

In  my  own  youth  I  was  well  acquainted  with 
one  who  called  Hawthorne  friend.  This  was  John 
Lewis  O'Sullivan,  a  figure  well  known  in  the  New 
York  of  his  time.  The  two  men  were  akin  in  poli 
tics  in  so  far  as  Hawthorne  had  any.  O'Sullivan 
was  a  man  of  partly  Irish  descent,  of  much,  over 
much  sentiment,  and  an  ardent  humanitarian. 
Some  sixty  years  ago  he  took  up  the  topic  of  cap 
ital  punishment,  and  published  an  arraignment  of 
it  which  called  forth  bitter  condemnation  from 
orthodox  divines.  These  personages  then  held  that 
the  sentence  "  Whoso  sheddeth  man's  blood,  by 
man  shall  his  blood  be  shed,"  was  a  divine  sentence, 
binding  for  all  time. 

O'Sullivan  once  called  upon  me  after  visiting 
Hawthorne  at  Brook  Farm.  He  brought  back  the 
impression  that  the  ways  of  the  rural  community 
were  little  to  the  liking  of  his  friend.  O'Sullivan 
was  at  the  time  editor  of  the  "  Democratic  Review," 
for  which  Hawthorne  had  already  written  several 
stories.  He  seems  to  have  relied  somewhat  upon 
his  engagement  with  this  magazine  for  lasting 


THE  WAYSIDE  37 

employment.  But  the  periodical,  if  I  remember 
rightly,  turned  out  to  be  little  more  than  a  cam 
paign  document,  and  its  immediate  end  being  ac 
complished,  it  ceased  to  appear. 

Some  personal  remembrance  must  add  whatever 
it  can  to  this  very  fragmentary  tribute.  More  than 
fifty  years  ago,  Dr.  Howe  and  I  drove  out  to  Con 
cord  to  visit  Horace  Mann  and  his  wife,  who  had 
found  a  summer  boarding  place  next  door  to  the 
Manse,  where  the  Hawthornes  were  installed.  We 
brought  with  us  our  little  daughter  of  about  the 
same  age  as  Una  Hawthorne.  In  the  course  of 
the  day,  we  found  our  way  into  the  Hawthorne 
residence,  where  Mrs.  Hawthorne  received  us  very 
graciously.  She  promised  that  we  should  see 
her  husband.  Just  then  a  male  figure  descended 
the  stairs.  "  My  husband,"  she  cried,  "  here  are 
Dr.  and  Mrs.  Howe."  What  we  did  see  was  a 
broad  hat  pulled  down  over  a  hidden  face,  and 
a  figure  that  quickly  vanished  through  an  opposite 
door. 

I  think  that  Mrs.  Hawthorne  made  some  excuse 
about  an  appointment  which  called  her  husband  to 
go  upon  the  river  with  Thoreau. 

The  Mann  couple  had  a  son  of  the  age  of  Una 
and  my  Julia.  The  three  little  creatures  prattled 
and  played  together  under  the  trees  in  front  of 
the  house,  while  Mrs.  Hawthorne  kindly  showed 
me  the  bedroom  furniture  which  she  had  adorned 


38  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

with  pen  and  ink  outline.  At  the  head  and  foot 
of  her  bedstead  were  Thorwaldsen's  Night  and 
Morning.  On  the  washstand  was  outlined  Venus 
rising  from  the  Sea,  from  Flaxman's  Illustrations 
of  Homer. 

Those  three  dear  children,  Una,  Horace,  and 
Julia,  all  lived  to  attain  maturity,  and  all  left  the 
world  too  soon.  The  memory  of  the  one  last  named 
binds  me  ever  to  Concord  with  a  debt  of  gratitude, 
for  she,  my  dearest  child,  fed  upon  its  philosophy, 
and  grew  radiant  in  its  atmosphere. 

So,  the  first  time  that  I  saw  Hawthorne,  I  did 
not  see  him,  but  I  was  yet  to  have  that  pleasure. 
Years  after  the  time  already  named,  Mrs.  Mann, 
who  was  residing  in  Concord,  invited  me  to  spend 
a  day  or  two  with  her,  and  also  invited  some  friends 
for  the  evening.  Among  these  were  the  Hawthornes, 
who  were  at  that  time  domiciled  at  Wayside.  After 
a  while,  Mrs.  Mann  told  me  that  she  wished  to 
make  me  acquainted  with  Mr.  Hawthorne.  I  re 
plied,  "  Oh,  no !  I  know  too  well  how  he  hates  to 
meet  strangers."  She  insisted,  saying  that  since  his 
residence  abroad  he  had  changed  much  in  this  re 
spect.  Accordingly,  we  met,  and  I  encountered  the 
beauty  of  those  eyes,  which  I  could  compare  to  no 
thing  but  tremulous  sapphires.  The  next  day  I  had 
his  company  on  the  train,  returning  to  Boston.  We 
talked  a  little  of  "  Blithedale  Romance,"  and  I 
said,  "  Mr.  Hawthorne,  you  were  cruel  to  say  that 


THE  WAYSIDE  39 

Zenobia  would  never  have  drowned  herself  if  she 
had  known  how  unsightly  her  appearance  would 
have  been  when  found." 

"  Was  it  not  true  ?  "  he  asked,  with  some  mis 
chief  in  his  look,  presently  adding,  "  I  had  to  go 
out  in  my  boat  to  look  for  her." 

We  met  once  again  at  a  familiar  dinner  at  James 
T.  Fields' s  house,  where  Anthony  Trollope,  Edwin 
Whipple  were,  with  myself,  the  other  guests.  Of 
this  occasion  I  can  only  remember  that  it  was  most 
delightful,  and  that  Hawthorne  seemed  at  ease  and 
well  pleased. 

Hawthorne's  use  of  the  supernatural  in  his  tales 
has  truly  a  historic  value.  It  preserves  for  us  the 
fantastic  melancholy  of  the  Puritan  imagination. 
Those  forbears  of  ours  everywhere  perceived  the 
influence  of  the  bodily  devil.  He  was  as  real  to 
them  as  flesh  and  blood  are  to  us.  Their  belief 
in  witchcraft  and  demoniac  possession  was  the  logi 
cal  outcome  of  their  merciless  theory  of  religion. 
Theirs  was  the  terrible  Jehovah  of  the  Hebrews ; 
to  the  Christian  revelation  of  a  God  of  love  and 
pity,  they  had  not  attained. 

The  works  which  show  most  of  this  element  were 
written  in  the  author's  unsocial  days.  We  must 
deem  the  isolation  fortunate  in  which  these  seeds  of 
terror  ripened  into  blossoms  of  power  and  beauty. 
Would  Hawthorne  have  accomplished  things  more 
marvelous  if  he  had  had  the  run  of  the  London 


40  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

clubs,  or  the  entree  into  the  fashionable  world  of 
the  world's  metropolis  ?  Truly,  he  needed  them 
not. 

What,  then,  was  Hawthorne's  world  ?  I  answer 
that  he  lived  in  a  palatial  region  all  his  own.  No 
occasion  had  he  for  page  or  butler,  for  tricksy  spir 
its,  fine  as  Ariel,  served  him  at  will.  With  a  magi 
cian's  power,  he  stood  at  the  entrance  of  his  airy 
abode,  where  all  who  entered  must  see  and  believe 
as  he  willed.  He  was  not  of  Salem,  nor  of  Boston, 
nor  even  of  Concord  : 

"  Instead  of  any  upon  earth, 
The  civic  heavens  receive  him." 

MR.  CONWAY  :  It  is  a  sweet  and  pleasant  thing, 
in  the  joy  of  closing  years,  for  some  of  us,  that  we 
have  lived  long  enough  to  listen  to  and  appreciate 
these  words  of  Mrs.  Howe  concerning  her  best 
contemporary,  or  at  least  the  one  to  whom  she 
looked  up  in  her  youth,  and  I  can  congratulate 
the  young  people  here  that  they  will  be  able  to 
carry  through  their  lives  this  sweet  and  charming 
souvenir. 

I  shall  now  have  the  pleasure  of  presenting  a 
study  of  Hawthorne's  place  in  literature  from  the 
Hon.  Charles  Francis  Adams,  who  has  looked  into 
the  study  of  history  with  broad  and  critical  acumen, 
and  made  discoveries  in  the  most  interesting  eras 
of  this  country.  I  might  speak  particularly  of  the 


THE   WAYSIDE  41 

great  analytical  power  with  which  he  has  treated 
the  characters  and  figures  who  have  determined 
the  history  of  this  country.  Partly  Mr.  Adams's 
excellence  in  all  these  matters  is  hereditary.  For 
my  part,  having  been  brought  up  in  the  Jeffersonian 
region,  in  the  region  of  the  Randolphs  and  of  the 
triumphant  democracy,  who  regarded  federalism  as 
wearing  horns  of  a  peculiarly  sharp  and  ugly  char 
acter,  and  a  great  number  of  cloven  hoofs,  namely, 
old  John  Adams,  my  first  impression  I  think  in 
history  was  when  I  discovered  in  a  happy  moment 
that  it  was  old  John  Adams,  the  man  I  had  been 
trained  to  hate  down  in  Virginia,  who  saved  us  from 
a  war  with  France,  which  would  have  been  the  worst 
and  ugliest  in  all  the  ugly  history  of  our  wars  ;  and 
when  I  first  got  to  love  and  venerate  old  John  Adams 
for  sending  that  commission,  confronting  in  the  mat 
ter  even  George  Washington,  who  was  prepared 
to  draw  his  sword  again  —  when  I  found  that 
all  my  old  theory  of  John  Adams  was  an  effigy 
and  a  mistake,  then  all  sorts  of  impressions  in 
historical  matters  came.  I  found  I  was  deceived 
in  regard  to  that  President,  and  might  be  with 
regard  to  other  things ;  and  I  have  been  assisted 
in  subsequent  studies,  like  many  other  students 
of  history,  by  the  gentleman  I  have  now  the  plea 
sure  of  introducing,  Mr.  Charles  Francis  Adams, 
who  will  speak  to  us  on  "  Hawthorne's  Place  in 
Literature." 


42  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

ADDRESS   OF   CHARLES   FRANCIS    ADAMS 

The  audience  need  not  be  disturbed.  The  bundle 
of  material  I  am  laying  on  the  table  is  not  to  be 
inflicted  upon  you  in  its  entirety.  It  contains  matter 
for  brief  reference  only.  But  Mrs.  Howe,  in  the 
course  of  the  charming  paper  she  has  just  read,  in 
a  voice  and  with  intonations  more  charming  even 
than  the  paper's  contents,  interjected  the  remark 
that  she  understood  discursiveness  was  on  this 
occasion  permissible.  At  the  very  beginning  let  me 
say  that  discursiveness  will  in  what  I  am  about  to 
say,  be,  not  the  exception,  but  the  rule. 

In  the  first  place,  however,  let  me  explain  my 
being  here  at  all,  —  the  how  and  why  of  it ;  for  I 
chance  not  to  be  a  transcendentalist,  —  neither,  for 
that  matter,  was  Hawthorne  !  —  nor  do  I  belong  to 
what  is  known  as  the  Concord  school  of  thought. 
Mrs.  Lothrop  will  bear  me  out  to  the  letter  when  I 
tell  you  that,  some  time  ago,  she  wrote  asking  me 
to  contribute  to  this  occasion,  and  I  at  once  re 
plied  that  so  doing  was  quite  out  of  the  question. 
Hawthorne  I  knew  merely  as  that  writer  of  fiction 
who,  in  my  estimation,  stood  distinctly  first  among 
purely  literary  men  by  America  yet  produced; 
and  were  I  to  comply  with  her  request,  —  a  thing 
not  convenient  in  itself,  —  I  could  only  say  as 
much,  repeating,  in  words  slightly  varied,  perhaps, 
what  had  been  often  said  before.  Not  satisfied  with 


THE  WAYSIDE  43 

this  reply,  Mrs.  Lothrop  again  addressed  me,  press 
ing  her  request  even  more  urgently,  and  on  the 
ground  that  the  preeminence  I  assigned  to  Haw 
thorne  as  a  literary  artist  was  in  itself  enough,  and 
eminently  fitting  to  be  set  forth  on  this,  the  cen 
tennial  of  his  birth.  And  so  she  begged  me  to 
reconsider  my  decision. 

There  were  reasons  why  I  felt  it  to  a  degree 
obligatory  on  me  not  to  persist  in  my  refusal.  I  do 
most  unfeignedly  dislike  to  talk  when  I  feel  that  I 
am  in  no  way  peculiarly  qualified  to  throw  light  on 
the  topic  under  discussion,  and  am  also  conscious 
that,  generally  speaking,  I  have  nothing  in  partic 
ular  to  say.  The  talking-in-public  habit  I  hold  to 
be  an  objectionable  habit.  But  it  so  chances  that, 
so  far  as  Concord  is  concerned,  I  am  a  very  near 
neighbor.  Indeed,  I  might  say  a  resident ;  for 
while  my  house  is  in  Lincoln,  the  line  between 
Lincoln  and  Concord  runs  across  "  the  old  Baker 
farm  "  on  which  the  house  stands.  Thus  in  closest 
way  a  neighbor,  I  feel  myself  under  obligation  to 
perform  neighborly  acts ;  and  if  there  is  one  act 
more  neighborly  than  another,  —  altruism,  I  might 
almost  put  it,  in  its  most  etherealized  form,  —  it  is 
to  contribute  freely  whatever  one  may  be  thought 
able  to  contribute  on  an  occasion  such  as  this. 
Hence  my  being  here.  It  recalls  to  me  in  a  certain 
way  the  familiar  reply  made  by  Dr.  Holmes  to  the 
anxious  mother's  inquiry  as  to  the  proper  time  for 


44  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

a  child's  education  to  begin.  He  answered,  you 
remember,  that  the  proper  time  for  a  child's  educa 
tion  to  begin  was  about  one  hundred  and  fifty  years 
before  it  was  born.  So  with  this  address  of  mine. 
Lincoln,  you  may  remember,  was  part  of  Concord 
until  the  23d  day  of  April,  1754;  and  with  a 
proper  sense  of  obligation,  we  of  Lincoln  acknow 
ledge  the  maternity.  On  behalf  of  Lincoln  I  am 
here ;  and  accordingly  an  address  for  to-day  may 
be  said  to  have  been  foreordained  for  me  eighty 
and  odd  years  before  I  was  born. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  have  come  with  nothing 
prepared.  What  I  may  say  will  accordingly  be  said 
in  a  purely  conversational  way  ;  it  is  a  talk  about 
Hawthorne.  As  such,  it  will  be  largely  made  up 
of  the  utterance  of  thoughts  which  suggest  them 
selves  as  I,  so  to  speak,  meander  on  from  point  to 
point. 

Personally,  and  as  a  living  entity,  I  know  nothing 
of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne.  I  say  this  with  a  distinct 
sense  of  mortification  at  finding  myself  compelled 
to  confess  such  remissness.  But  all  through  life 
I  have  failed  to  avail  myself  of  my  opportunities.  I 
never  exchanged  a  word  with  Emerson !  After  all, 
however,  I  was,  perhaps,  in  the  case  of  Hawthorne, 
not  so  very  remiss.  How  could  I  have  met  him  ? 
He,  a  morbidly  shy  and  very  retiring  man,  lived 
here  at  Concord,  —  then  a  remote  country  town,  — 
rarely  visiting  the  city  ;  and  in  the  summer  of 


THE  WAYSIDE  45 

1853,  he  went  to  Europe,  not  returning  until  1860. 
In  that  same  summer  of  1853  I  entered  Harvard 
College  ;  and  shortly  after  the  famous  writer's 
return  to  America,  a  wave  of  the  great  Civil  War 
swept  me  into  the  army.  Never  again  were  he  and 
I  in  the  same  neighborhood  even ;  and  so,  had  I 
so  much  as  laid  eyes  on  him,  it  would  have  been  by 
chance.  In  his  later  years  he  was  a  member  of  the 
somewhat  famous  Boston  Saturday  Club,  —  one 
of  the  few  forms  of  social  entertainment  he  seems 
to  have  really  enjoyed.  But  when  my  own  time 
came  to  be  chosen  into  that  circle,  though  many 
of  his  famous  contemporaries  still  gathered  about 
the  table  in  the  familiar  room  at  the  Parker  House, 
—  hardly  one  of  them  is  now  left !  —  Hawthorne 
had  long  since  passed  away. 

But  in  connection  with  that  club  and  Haw 
thorne's  membership,  there  is  one  anecdote  pleasant 
to  recall,  which  has  furnished  me  food  for  reflection. 
There  were  giants  in  those  days!  The  Saturday 
Club  met  once  a  month,  —  its  last  Saturday  always, 
— dining  at  two  o'clock.  Three  of  its  members  lived 
here  in  Concord,  —  Mr.  Emerson,  its  central  figure, 
to  meet  whom,  indeed,  on  his  Saturday  comings  to 
Boston  the  club  was  originally  formed ;  Judge  Rock- 
wood  Hoar,  and,  after  his  return  from  Europe, 
Mr.  Hawthorne.  Talking  of  the  olden  time  and 
former  gatherings,  Judge  Hoar  afterwards  told  me 
that  in  those  days  there  was  no  convenient  even- 


46  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

ing  train  to  Concord ;  so  if  they  sat  a  little  late  at 
table,  it  was  not  easy  to  get  there  betimes.  They 
did  not  like  to  cut  the  dinners  short ;  consequently 
it  was  his  custom,  on  those  monthly  occasions,  to 
have  his  son  drive  to  Waltham,  there  to  meet  the 
later  suburban  train,  and  take  home  the  Concord 
contingent.  As  he  described  those  winter  drives, 
he  dwelt  on  the  fact  of  Emerson  and  Hawthorne, 
side  by  side,  on  the  back  seat  of  that  modest  carry 
all,  and  wondered  where  and  how  another  such 
seat-load  could  have  been  obtained.  As  he  told  me, 
I  could  not  in  my  own  thoughts  help  including  the 
judge  himself.  What  an  extraordinary  freight  it 
was  for  a  one-horse  country  carriage,  —  Emerson, 
Hawthorne,  and  Rockwood  Hoar !  As  I  just  now 
remarked,  —  There  were  giants  in  those  days ! 
None  of  us  here  will  live  long  enough  again  to  see 
three  men  so  well  worth  knowing  —  so  memorable 
in  our  country's  annals,  so  replete  with  philosophy, 
fancy,  shrewdness,  and  wit  —  as  were  those  three, 
packed  together  in  one  small  vehicle,  driving  in  the 
winter  evening  darkness  from  Waltham  to  their 
homes  in  Concord. 

I  have  said  that  I  never  met  Hawthorne.  If  my 
recollection  is  correct,  he  died  on  the  19th  of  May, 
1864.  When  he  died,  and,  indeed,  for  some  years 
before,  I  was  far  away,  living  in  a  different  environ 
ment.  The  gentleman  who  introduced  me  spoke  of 
Virginia.  The  19th  of  May,  1864,  came  about  in  the 


THE  WAYSIDE  47 

midst  of  the  carnage  of  that  awful  march  of  the 
army  of  the  Potomac  from  the  Rappahannock  to 
the  James.  Losing  thousands  of  men  each  day, 
Grant  was  gradually  grinding  away  the  Confeder 
ate  force  before  him.  The  19th  of  May  fell  be 
tween  Spottsylvania  and  Cold  Harbor  —  halfway 
between  the  two ;  and  looking  back,  I  find  that  the 
day  Hawthorne  died  was  one  of  the  gloomiest  of 
that  gloomy  period.  On  the  18th  Grant's  plan 
of  campaign  had  been  roughly  shattered ;  Sigel 
had  been  badly  worsted  in  the  valley  of  the  Shen- 
andoah  ;  Butler  had  been  defeated  on  the  James  ; 
Banks  had  met  with  reverses  in  Louisiana ;  and 
now,  on  the  19th,  there  was  heavy  fighting  in  the 
army  of  the  Potomac's  front.  Lee  had  taken  the 
aggressive.  I  well  remember  at  that  time  read 
ing  in  the  papers  of  Hawthorne's  sudden  death; 
but  we  in  Virginia  were  then  taking  part  in  too 
rich  a  harvest  of  death  to  take  much  note  of  the 
passing  of  any  individual.  It  was  merely  one  more 
gone,  when  many  daily  went. 

Knowing  Hawthorne  individually  not  at  all,  I 
have  further  no  grounds  upon  which  to  base  the 
claim  of  any  particular  insight  in  respect  to  him  as 
an  author.  Indeed,  it  is  years  since  I  have  read  his 
writings  ;  and  of  them  I  must  needs  speak  from  the 
recollection  and  impressions  of  long  ago.  I  am, 
also,  naturally  inclined  to  be  otherwise  minded, 
and  a  bit  iconoclastic ;  and  in  what  I  am  about 


48  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

to  say  there  may  be  opinions  expressed  in  which 
some  of  those  here  will  not  be  inclined  to  concur. 
In  such  case,  permit  me  to  suggest  it  would  add 
greatly  to  my  own  interest  in  the  occasion,  and 
might  to  the  general  interest,  were  I  to  elicit  a 
spirit  of  contradiction,  —  some  impulse  to  set  me 
right. 

What  then  do  I  know  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  ? 
I  have  told  you  what  I  do  not  know.  Curiously 
enough,  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  was  the  subject  of 
the  first  production  of  mine  I  ever  saw  in  print. 
Seeing  one's  self  for  the  first  time  in  type  marks 
an  epoch  in  life  ;  that  epoch  is  with  me  inseparably 
associated  with  Nathaniel  Hawthorne.  Possibly  my 
friend  Mr.  Sanborn  here  may  recollect  something 
about  it,  for  he  and  I  were  in  college  together ; 
and,  if  my  memory  serves  me  right,  he  was  one  of 
the  editors  of  the  "  Harvard  Magazine,"  as  the 
undergraduate  periodical  of  that  day  was  called. 
Indeed,  I  vaguely  seem  to  remember  him  as  one  of 
the  originators  thereof. 

MR.  SANBORN  :  Don't  press  the  question,  please. 

MR.  ADAMS:  The  first  paper  I  ever  wrote  for 
print  was  one  for  that  college  magazine,  and  the 
title  of  it  was  "Hawthorne."  It  was  forty-nine 
years  ago ;  I  was  a  youth  on  the  verge  of  twenty, 
—  still  in  my  teens  !  and  the  other  evening,  —  be 
thinking  myself  of  it  in  this  connection,  —  I  hunted 
up  the  copy  of  that  paper  I  had  chanced  to  pre- 


THE  WAYSIDE  49 

serve,  and  read  it.  I  doubt  if  I  had  read  it  before 
since  it  appeared,  in  July,  1855.  I  found  it  dread 
fully  funny  — 

MR.  SANBORN  :  It  was  at  the  time. 

MR.  ADAMS  :  So  you  also,  alone  with  me  prob 
ably  among  those  now  living,  actually  recall  that 
utterance  !  As  I  just  now  said,  I  found  my  paper 
of  forty-nine  years  back  awfully  funny  reading; 
but  none  the  less,  in  it  was  one  sentence  applicable 
to  the  present  occasion, — indeed,  it  might  serve 
me  as  a  text.  It  is  this :  "Among  American  writers 
of  fiction,  with  us  at  least,  Hawthorne  stands  forth 
preeminent."  And  that  conclusion  at  least  is  one 
I  have  since  seen  no  occasion  to  revise  !  Otherwise, 
my  paper  was  delightful;  the  editorial  "Us"  and 
"  We  "  rang  out  in  every  line.  I  began  with  a  quo 
tation  from  "A  distinguished  British  essayist," 
through  which  form  of  speech  I  made  reference  to 
the  late  lamented  and  much  bequoted  T.  B.  Ma- 
caulay  ;  and,  with  a  gravity  truly  comical,  I  seated 
myself  in  the  Harvard  tribunal  of  the  period  when, 
as  Thackeray  would  have  put  it,  that  particular 
Plancus  known  in  history  as  "  Frank  "  Pierce  was 
consul,  and  proceeded  to  pass  judgment  on  Nathan 
iel  Hawthorne,  indicating  my  approval  of  this,  as 
my  condemnation  of  that.  None  the  less,  on  what 
I  may  refer  to  as  the  nub  of  the  matter,  I  was  even 
then  right.  I  will  not  disturb  the  oblivion  which 
covers  my  other  utterances ;  but  in  1904,  as  in 


50  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

1855,  I  hold  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  easily  first 
among  American  writers,  —  preeminent  in  what 
has  since  become  a  lengthened  roll.  Looking  back 
through  half  a  century  of  ever-shifting  conclusions, 
that  judgment  I  to-day  confirm. 

A  week  or  so  since,  I  chanced  in  some  literary 
paper  across  a  reproduced  list  of  Lord  Avery's 
one  hundred  books  in  all  languages,  not,  as  he 
takes  care  to  say,  "  the  best,"  but  "  of  the  best ; " 
and  as  such  recommended  to  readers.  Recently 
revised,  the  famous  list  had  been  brought  out 
afresh.  I  have  just  given  it  as  my  judgment  that 
Hawthorne  is  preeminent  among  American  writers  ; 
and  yet  in  that  list  of  a  hundred  best  books,  I  do  not 
find  the  name  of  one  of  Hawthorne's.  But  I  do 
find  here  several  to  which,  I  fancy,  no  well-qualified 
critic  would  assign  a  preference  to  Hawthorne's 
masterpieces.  For  instance,  here  is  Bulwer  Lyt- 
ton's  "  Last  Days  of  Pompeii ;  "  Kingsley's  "  West 
ward  Ho  ;  "  the  "  Self  Help  "  of  Samuel  Smiles ; 
George  Eliot's  "Adam  Bede;"  Cook's  "Voy 
ages  ;  "  Lewes's  "  History  of  Philosophy  ;  "  Greene's 
"Short  History;" — all  good  books,  nearly  all 
classics.  But  surely,  making  no  mention  of  the 
"  Scarlet  Letter,"  the  "  Marble  Faun  "  is,  even  as  a 
tourist's  guide,  —  much  more  as  a  work  of  art  and 
literary  masterpiece,  —  scarcely  to  be  omitted  from 
a  list  in  which  "The  Last  Days  of  Pompeii"  is 
admitted  to  a  place ! 


THE  WAYSIDE  51 

Now,  undeterred  by  the  authority  of  Lord  Avery, 
I  propose  here  to  demonstrate,  if  so  doing  is  in 
my  power,  that  Hawthorne  ranks  far  and  away 
first  among  American  literary  men  ;  and,  further, 
that  he  alone  among  them  is  worthy  to  be  included 
in  that  memorable  body  of  luminaries  of  whom 
Shakespeare,  De  Foe,  Addison,  Swift,  Fielding, 
Goldsmith,  Scott,  Dickens,  and  Thackeray  are  the 
shining  lights. 

So  far,  all  I  have  said  is  preliminary.  Let  me 
now  address  myself  to  my  task.  In  the  first  place, 
analyze  —  we  must  distinguish  the  elements.  Haw 
thorne  was  essentially  a  writer  of  stories  and  of 
works  of  fancy,  in  other  words,  a  literary  artist. 
He  pictured  with  the  pen.  Looking  over  that  con 
stellation,  just  enumerated,  of  those  who  also  so 
pictured,  what  are  the  elements  which  constitute 
recognized  greatness  therein?  Subjected  to  a  rough 
analysis,  those  elements  reduce  themselves,  I  sub 
mit,  to  five:  first,  delineation  of  character, — 
portraiture ;  secondly,  story-framing,  —  sequence 
of  the  tale,  and  the  skillful  development  of  its 
plot ;  thirdly,  the  philosophy  of  life  and  passion  ; 
fourthly,  style,  —  skill  in  clothing  thought  in  lan 
guage  ;  and,  fifthly,  that  fancy  which  decorates  nar 
rative  and  thought.  This  premised,  let  us  take  up 
Hawthorne's  work,  assigning  him  in  each  respect 
his  proper  place  among  the  immortals  grouped  in 
Fame's  Temple. 


52  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

First,  as  respects  delineation  of  character,  — 
pen  portraiture.  In  that  respect  I  feel  disposed 
to  say  that  Dickens  is  supreme,  —  first  among  all 
artists  in  English  speech,  even  Shakespeare  not 
excepted.  This  may  sound  like  exaggeration,  — 
heterodox,  if  not  paradox.  Yet  after  briefly  re 
viewing  our  list  of  literary  Titians,  Velasquezes, 
and  Rembrandts,  —  the  Holbeins,  Van  Dykes,  and 
Reynoldses  of  letters,  —  perhaps  you  may  come  to 
think  in  this  respect  with  me. 

Begin  with  Shakespeare !  Until  the  time  of 
Shakespeare,  I  question  whether  any  writer  since 
Homer  had  developed  distinct  and  universally  ac 
cepted  types  of  men.  It  is  a  little  strange,  but  in 
the  gallery  of  portraiture  we  do  have  to  jump  from 
Ulysses  and  Ajax  and  Hector  and  Helen  across 
twenty-five  centuries  of  utter  barrenness  to  Panta- 
gruel,  Don  Quixote,  and  Sancho  Panza ;  Hamlet, 
Othello,  and  Falstaff.  During  the  whole  interme 
diate  period  I  cannot  recall  a  single  delineation  of 
a  type,  of  which  you  would  say,  as  you  might  say 
of  any  living  man,  that  he  was  a  regular  Don 
Quixote  or  Touchstone ;  and,  when  you  said  it, 
any  moderately  well-informed  person  would  at  once 
know  exactly  what  you  meant,  —  the  resemblance 
would  be  recognized,  or  denied.  It  is  the  same 
power  of  pen-delineation  which  Rembrandt  and 
Franz  Hals  had  with  the  brush ;  and  of  it  there 
have  been  perhaps  a  dozen  great  natural  masters. 


THE   WAYSIDE  53 

In  power  Shakespeare  is  probably,  among  these, 
supreme,  with  his  Hamlet,  his  Lear,  and,  above 
all,  his  Falstaff ;  but  in  ease  and  wealth  of  produc 
tion,  —  the  lavishness  of  outpouring,  —  Dickens 
indisputably  ranks  first.  These  two  apart,  as  you 
run  the  list  over,  how  few  they  are,  and  how  little 
each  of  those  few  has  contributed  !  Who  is  there 
after  Rabelais,  Cervantes,  and  Shakespeare,  until 
you  come  to  De  Foe,  with  his  one  creation, — 
"  Robinson  Crusoe  "  ?  Swift  introduced  into  the 
world  Captain  Lemuel  Gulliver,  that  famous,  as 
well  as  veracious,  voyager.  Moliere  I  leave  out  of 
the  account.  Next,  in  English,  comes  Addison, 
with  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley,  —  his  portrait  is  ever 
before  our  eyes.  After  him  came  Fielding,  with 
Tom  Jones,  Blifil,  and  Parson  Adams.  Richardson 
at  the  same  time  invented  Sir  Charles  Grand ison. 
Is  Sheridan  entitled  to  mention  because  of  Mrs. 
Malaprop  with  her  immortal  "allegory  on  the 
banks  of  the  Nile?  "  or  Mrs.  Shelley,  for  Franken 
stein,  —  scarcely  a  bit  of  portraiture,  but  certainly 
a  name  suggestive?  Sir  Walter  Scott  would,  I 
hold,  as  respects  productiveness  of  types,  rank 
third,  after  Dickens  and  Shakespeare.  Captain 
Dalgetty,  Dominie  Sampson,  Edie  Ochiltree,  An 
drew  Fairservice,  and  Caleb  Balderstone  are  crea 
tions  not  made  to  die.  Yet  when  we  think  how 
universally  Scott  is  read,  it  is  rather  surprising 
how  few  characters  he  developed  which  have  passed 


54  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

into  familiar  speech,  embodying  types.  Thackeray 
I  should  say  created  seven,  —  Becky  Sharp,  Major 
Pendennis,  and  Morgan,  masterpieces  all,  with 
Colonel  Newcomb,  Captain  Costigan,  Barry  Lyn 
don,  and  Esmond,  in  the  second  rank. 

But  finally,  Dickens  —  how  he  did  outdo  them 
all !  A  very  Rubens  among  literary  artists,  what 
prodigality  in  production !  Take  the  first  four  or 
five  of  his  stories.  They  teem  with  types.  Pick 
wick,  for  example  —  every  one  of  us  has  our  Pick 
wicks  in  actual  life  ;  and  Tracy  Tupman ;  and  the 
two  Wellers,  "  Mr.  Tony  "  and  "  Sam ;  "  Jingle, 
the  Rev.  Stiggins,  Potts,  of  the  "  Eatonswill  Ga 
zette,"  Serjeant  Buzfuz,  Mr.  Justice  Stareleigh, 
and  Mrs.  Leo  Hunter.  Do  we  not  meet  Mrs.  Leo 
in  every  society  all  our  lives,  and  at  once  classify 
her,  and  place  her,  and  mentally  address  her  as 
Mrs.  Hunter?  Next  came  "  Oliver  Twist."  There 
are  Bumble,  of  Beadledom,  the  "  Artful  Dodger," 
Noah  Claypole,  Bill  Sykes,  and  Fagin.  "  Nicholas 
Nickleby  "  follows.  Who  does  not  know  Wackford 
Squeers,  of  Dotheboy's  Hall  ?  —  and  little  Wack 
ford  ?  Smike  also  is  a  tolerably  well-known  type. 
Immediately  afterwards,  the  "  Old  Curiosity  Shop  " 
produced  its  array  of  portraits :  Richard  Swivel- 
ler,  Little  Nell,  Sampson  and  Sally  Brass,  Quilp 
and  Mrs.  Jarle}^.  Finally,  "  Martin  Chuzzlewit." 
Here  we  have  Pecksniff  and  Mark  Tapley,  and 
both  names  are  to-day  in  conventional  use. 


THE  WAYSIDE  55 

"  What  a  regular  Pecksniff  the  man  is  !  "  or,  "  He 
is  a  veritable  Mark  Tapley !  "  convey  just  as  clear 
an  idea  of  two  types  of  men  as  to  say  of  one  that 
he  is  an  out-and-out  Shylock,  or  of  another  that  he 
is  Dogberry  to  the  life  !  As  for  Betsey  Prig  and 
Sarah  Gamp,  I  most  confidently  asseverate  that 
Jack  Falstaff  and  Dame  Quickly  themselves  are 
not  greater  creations,  nor  more  true  to  nature. 
You  may  never  have  seen  the  originals,  but  you  re 
cognize  them  at  once.  They  are  old  acquaintances. 
Why !  not  two  days  ago  I  chanced  to  be  read 
ing  my  morning  paper,  —  this  copy  now  in  my 
hand  of  the  Boston  "  Herald,"  —  the  "  Herald  "  of 
July  2,  and  in  the  lowest  right-hand  corner  of  the 
editorial  page  my  eye  caught  the  name  "Sairey 
Gamp."  It  headed  the  following  familiar  words, 
utilized  as  an  advertisement :  — 

"  If  it  was  n't  for  the  nerve  a  little  sip  of  Sandf ord's 
Ginger  gives  me  I  never  could  go  through  with  what 
I  sometimes  has  to  do.  Mrs.  Harris,  I  says,  leave  the 
bottle  on  the  chimney-piece,  and  don't  ask  me  to  take 
none,  but  let  me  put  my  lips  to  it  when  I  am  dispoged, 
and  then  I  will  do  what  I  am  engaged  to  do  according 
to  the  best  of  my  ability." 

Now  that,  I  submit,  is  enduring  fame ;  if  it  is 
not  in  itself  immortality,  it  foreshadows  immortal 
ity.  The  current  acceptance  of  a  book  or  character 
for  half  a  century  after  its  publication  or  appear- 


56  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

ance  makes  a  classic  of  it.  It  has  won  its  permanent 
place  in  literature  or  speech.  It  is  just  sixty  years 
since  Dickens  brought  Sarah  Gamp  and  Mark 
Tapley  before  the  world ;  and  to-day  I  turn  the 
editorial  page  of  the  Boston  "  Herald,"  and  in  one 
place  I  see  a  certain  gentleman  referred  to  as  "  the 
Mark  Tapley  of  political  candidates,"  while  in 
another  place  I  find  "  Sairey  Gamp  "  figuring  as 
the  head  of  an  advertisement  for  a  beverage, — 
though  not  exactly  that  to  an  indulgence  in  which 
the  immortal  Sarah  was  so  prone  ! 

And  now,  before  considering  Hawthorne  as  a 
delineator  of  character,  —  the  originator  of  accepted 
types,  —  I  will  so  far  digress  again  as  to  put  a 
question  to  this  Concord  audience.  How  many 
types  in  all,  accepted  as  such  and  current  in  speech 
and  writing,  has  our  American  literature  contrib 
uted  to  the  collection? 

I  have  referred  to  Shakespeare,  Walter  Scott, 
Thackeray,  and  Dickens  as  prolific  creators  of  such. 
Dickens,  I  have  shown,  threw  them  off  with  an 
ease  and  profusion,  an  accuracy  of  insight  and 
expression,  —  the  attributes  of  true  genius.  His 
fecundity  was  like  that  of  Rubens  among  artists. 
In  all,  since  Shakespeare  wrote,  there  may  have 
been  some  fifty  or  perhaps  seventy-five  such  por 
trait  types  produced ;  and  to-day  they  hang  there, 
in  the  gallery  of  English  speech,  each  with  its  name 
a  proverb,  —  Shylock,  Falstaff,  Sir  Charles  Grandi- 


THE   WAYSIDE  57 

son,  and  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley ;  Major  Pendennis 
and  Sarah  Gamp.  Which,  and  how  many,  of  them, 
are  of  American  origin?  Since  I  agreed  to  take 
part  on  this  occasion  I  have  been  meditating  that 
problem,  —  trying  to  formulate  an  answer  to  the 
query.  Hawthorne  I  am  sure  has  not  contrib 
uted  ;  but  I  will  come  to  that  presently.  Mean 
while,  what  American  has  contributed?  In  all, 
after  best  reflection,  I  can  think  of  but  three  crea 
tions  the  mere  mention  of  which  by  name  calls  up 
a  figure  and  a  thought,  —  and  those  three  even 
would  be  more  or  less  open  to  criticism.  So  far  as 
I  can  summarize  it,  our  contribution  is  at  best 
meagre.  "  Rip  Van  Winkle  "  comes  first,  —  the  one 
creation  of  Washington  Irving.  Rip  Van  Winkle 
has  certainly  passed  into  speech ;  and,  as  personi 
fied  by  Jefferson  on  the  stage,  the  mention  of  the 
name  calls  up  a  familiar  figure  representative  of 
a  situation  and  a  thought.  But,  after  all,  is  Rip  a 
character  delineation  like  Falstaff  and  Sir  Roger, 
except  as  interpreted  by  Jefferson  ?  Giving  Irving 
the  advantage  of  the  doubt,  we  will,  however,  ac 
cept  his  portrait,  and  disallow  the  criticism.  Next, 
we  have  Mrs.  Stowe's  creation  of  Topsy,  in  "  Uncle 
Tom's  Cabin."  Topsy  is  unquestionably  a  type,  — 
not  a  type  of  the  first  class,  perhaps,  but  still  a 
type.  Apply  the  test !  If  at  this  moment  a  little 
negro  girl  in  rags,  and  with  unconscious  freedom  of 
act  and  speech,  were  to  pass  before  that  door,  and 


58  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

some  one  were  to  exclaim,  — "  What  a  regular 
Topsy ! "  every  other  person  here  would  know  at 
once  what  was  meant,  and  mentally  compare  the 
actual  with  the  ideal.  My  third  instance  is  of  more 
recent  origin,  —  the  famous  and  familiar  Colonel 
Starbottle,  the  creation  and  contribution  of  Bret 
Harte.  Like  the  Heathen  Chinee,  Colonel  Star- 
bottle,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  has  come  to  stay ; 
he  is  recognized,  and  as  such  accepted.  We  have 
all  seen  him;  some  of  us  have  had  the  pleasure 
of  a  personal  acquaintance  with  him.  Indeed,  Sir 
Roger  de  Coverley  is  by  Americans  far  less  generally 
known,  stands  scarcely  less  in  need  of  an  intro 
duction.  Beyond  these  three  who  here  can  aid  me 
to  a  name  ? 

Coming  back  to  Hawthorne,  no  one  will  claim, 
as  I  have  already  said,  that  as  a  delineator  of  char 
acter  Hawthorne  has  contributed  to  the  gallery 
any  universally  accepted  bit  of  portraiture.  Hester 
Prynne,  Aunt  Hepzibah,  Phoabe,  Judge  Pyncheon, 
and  Hilda  are  all  distinct  and  well  drawn  ;  but 
it  can  hardly  be  asserted  that  any  one  of  them 
has  passed  typically  into  familiar  speech.  On  this 
point,  however,  something  yet  remains  to  be  said. 
In  character  delineation  absolute  truth  to  nature  is 
not  always,  nor  even  generally,  either  the  surest  or 
the  quickest  passport  to  success  or  fame.  Even  in 
work  of  the  highest  genius  a  certain  touch  of  ex 
aggeration  — •  a  skillful  heightening  of  light  and 


THE  WAYSIDE  59 

shade  —  adds  to  the  result,  leading  to  a  quicker 
and  even  more  lasting  recognition.  Take,  for  in 
stance,  the  masterpieces  of  Shakespeare  and  Dick 
ens,  —  Falstaff  and  Dogberry  in  the  one  case,  and 
Sam  Weller  and  Sarah  Gamp  in  the  other.  In  all 
these  creations  there  is  a  very  agreeable,  but  none 
the  less  apparent,  element  of  the  grotesque,  some 
thing  remotely  suggestive  of  Thomas  Nast  and  the 
best  cartoons  in  "  Punch."  Nature  is  slightly  im 
proved  upon ;  its  complexion  is  artistically  height 
ened,  so  to  speak.  On  the  other  hand,  Sir  Roger 
de  Coverley  and  Major  Pendennis  I  hold  to  be 
higher  as  works  of  art,  because  absolutely  true. 
Yet  they  are  not  so  popular  as  those  first  named, 
nor  so  immediately  recognized.  To  Sir  Roger  and 
the  Major,  however,  recognized  places  are  conceded 
in  the  gallery  of  accepted  portraiture,  while  no 
such  general  recognition  and  acceptance  have  been 
extended  to  any  creation  of  Hawthorne's.  Yet  his 
work  is  in  this  respect  of  a  very  high  order, — 
higher,  I  think,  by  far  than  that  of  any  other 
American.  He  belongs  artistically  to  the  class  of 
Jane  Austen,  Anthony  Trollope,  and  George  Eliot, 
—  all  character  painters  of  the  first  class,  and  yet 
not  one  of  the  three  has  contributed  a  type  uni 
versally  accepted,  as,  for  instance,  Dogberry  and 
Mark  Tapley  are  accepted.  Perhaps,  though,  in 
Trollope's  case  a  claim  might  be  put  in  for  Mrs. 
Proudie.  And  so  I  am  inclined  to  think  that,  as  a 


60  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

skillful  portrait  painter  is  entitled  to  artistic  prefer 
ence  over  a  cartoonist  —  even  the  most  ingenious, 
prolific,  and  generally  accepted  —  as  a  delineator 
of  character,  taken  at  his  absolute  best,  as  in  "  The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables"  and  "The  Scarlet 
Letter,"  truth  to  nature,  real  power,  and  delicacy 
of  touch  being  the  tests,  —  I  am  inclined,  I  say,  to 
believe  the  world  is  likely  to  see  another  Dickens 
before  it  sees  another  Hawthorne. 

The  next  element  in  the  analysis  was  story-fram 
ing,  —  the  skill  with  which  the  work  is  put  together 
and  developed  to  a  moral  or  an  end.  Again,  my 
judgment  may  excite  surprise ;  not  improbably, 
dissent.  In  this  respect  I  do  not  consider  Walter 
Scott  or  Dickens  as  entitled  to  rank  particularly 
high.  Their  imaginations  were  prolific,  they  were 
great  as  story  tellers ;  but  as  craftsmen  they  were 
careless,  and  not  unseldom  clumsy.  The  best  gen 
eral  workman  in  this  field  I  know  of,  the  most 
skillful  framer  of  a  story  in  all  its  mechanical  and 
imaginative  parts,  was  one  I  have  not  as  yet  men 
tioned, —  Wilkie  Collins.  Trollope  also,  as  a 
sketcher  of  English  life,  while  careless  in  his  plots, 
put  his  material  together  with  marvelous  instinc 
tive  skill.  This  you  will  remember  excited  the  no 
tice  and  admiration  of  Hawthorne,  who  thereon 
expressed  himself  in  words  and  similes  which  the 
brother  artist  did  not  receive  in  a  spirit  of  unquali 
fied  delight. 


THE  WAYSIDE  61 

But  taking  these  two,  —  Anthony  Trollope  with 
his  "  Barchester  Towers  "  and  "  Small  House  at 
Allington,"  and  Wilkie  Collins  with  his  "No 
Name,"  "  Woman  in  White,"  and  "  Moonstone,"  - 
I  am  again  inclined  to  think  that  taking  Hawthorne 
at  his  best,  —  throwing  out  for  purpose  of  this  com 
parison  the  "  Blithedale  Romance,"  "  The  Marble 
Faun,"  and  the  "  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,"  and 
confining  ourselves  to  his  climax  in  story-framing, 
"The  Scarlet  Letter,"  — I  am  inclined  to  think 
that  nothing  done  in  that  line  by  Trollope  or  Col 
lins  —  much  less  by  Scott  or  Dickens  —  indicated 
a  higher  order  of  skill  in  workmanship  than  what 
Hawthorne  developed  as  he  dreamed  in  the  port- 
surveyor's  chair  at  the  Salem  Custom  House.  Com 
pare  this  effort  with  the  "  Legend  of  Montrose  " 
or  the  "  Fortunes  of  Nigel."  In  all  three  the 
atmosphere  and  personages  of  a  remote  historical 
period  were  worked  into  a  romance ;  and  there 
can,  I  think,  be  no  sort  of  question  that  in  the  con 
ception  and  framing  of  the  story  what  Hawthorne 
did  was  far  and  away  superior  to  the  work  of 
Walter  Scott. 

Next,  philosophy  ;  and  by  philosophy  I  mean  the 
study  of  the  passions,  and  of  the  problem  of  life ; 
so  to  speak,  the  tearing  out  the  heart  of  the  mys 
tery.  Here  again,  I  am  confident  Hawthorne  will 
find  his  rank  in  the  first  class.  We  no  longer  com 
pare  him  with  Trollope  or  Collins,  or  with  Dickens 


62  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

and  Thackeray ;  we  ascend  at  once  to  the  supreme, 
—  the  pride  and  ample  pinion  that  the  Theban 
eagle  bear,  sailing  with  supreme  dominion  through 
the  azure  deep  of  air.  Goethe  produced  one  great 
drama ;  so  doing  seemed  to  exhaust  him.  "  Faust " 
turns  on  one  of  the  passions ;  and  the  poet  devel 
oped  his  plot  and  philosophy  over  the  ruin  of  a 
girl.  Shakespeare  poured  out  half  a  dozen  Fausts, 
and,  having  done  so,  had  enough  left  for  a  world 
of  other  creations.  Running  the  whole  gamut  of 
the  passions,  he  exhausted  the  philosophy  of  life. 
In  "  Macbeth "  he  struck  the  chord  of  earthly 
ambition  ;  in  "  Lear,"  paternal  affection  and  filial 
ingratitude ;  in  "  Othello,"  conjugal  love  ;  in  "  Ham 
let,"  filial  devotion.  Having  premised  thus  much, 
what  can  be  claimed  for  Hawthorne?  Again,  we 
must  take  him  at  his  best,  and  by  his  highest 
judge  and  classify  him.  So  doing,  and  speaking 
from  the  mental  impression  surviving  the  passage 
of  years,  I  should  venture  to  assert  that  as  respects 
imagination,  insight,  passion,  and  power,  —  the  un 
veiling  of  a  human  soul  amid  the  temptations  and 
trials  of  earth,  "  The  Scarlet  Letter  "  is  worthy  to 
be  named  with  the  masterpieces  of  even  Goethe 
and  Shakespeare.  At  his  loftiest  flight  Hawthorne 
also  touched  the  zenith ;  he  too  soared  in  those 
azure  depths  of  air  ! 

Pass  on  to  the  next  element,  —  style.  We  have 
noted  delineation  of  character,  the  mechanism  of 


THE  WAYSIDE  63 

the  tale,  and  the  study  of  life  and  nature  involved 
in  it ;  now  consider  the  medium  through  which  the 
narrative  is  revealed,  and  in  which  the  philosophy 
is  clad.  Let  us  take,  for  purpose  of  example  and 
contrast,  some  half  dozen  or  so  of  those  to  whom 
a  natural  mastery  in  English  is  conceded.  Shake 
speare,  when  he  gets  fairly  down  to  prose,  as, 
for  instance,  in  "  Hamlet,"  is  supreme.  Shake 
speare  is  always  supreme !  Next,  Addison  —  Ad- 
dison  as  he  appears,  not  in  his  robes  of  critical 
state,  where  he  acts  as  a  sort  of  Mrs.  Jarley  to 
Milton,  but  in  those  "  Spectator "  papers  where, 
in  dressing-gown  and  slippers,  he  tells  us  of  Sir 
Roger's  visits  to  the  theatre  and  Westminster  Hall. 
It  is  the  perfection  of  English !  Then  Swift,  with 
his  clean-cut,  trenchant  expression,  as  sharp  and 
tempered,  and  about  as  hard,  as  a  butcher's  cleaver. 
Goldsmith,  who  made  the  commonplace  forever  fas 
cinating  by  the  mere  play  of  fancy  and  control  of 
words.  Both  Dickens  and  Scott  are  careless  writ 
ers,  saying  what  they  have  to  say  in  the  words 
and  way  which  suggest  themselves,  and  letting  it 
go  at  that.  Great  natural  masters,  they  were  not 
conscientious  workmen.  Not  so  Thackeray;  natu 
rally  great,  he  was  also  labored.  His  English  seems 
to  me  perfection,  as  perfect  as  that  of  Addison ; 
and  yet  I  do  not  prefer  it  to  Hawthorne's.  Again, 
take  Hawthorne  at  his  ripest  and  his  best,  —  in 
the  "  Transformation "  and  "Our  Old  Home;" 


64  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

take,  for  instance,  in  the  last  that  exquisite  de 
scription  of  Warwick  Castle,  or  his  trip  down  the 
Thames,  —  and  I  do  not  believe  skill  in  expression 
and  use  of  language  ever  did  or  ever  can  go  fur 
ther.  It  will  bear  comparison  with  the  best  English 
literature  affords. 

And  here  let  me  again  digress,  for  I  have  come 
to  the  last  element  in  my  analysis,  —  fancy.  There 
is  one  thing  in  Hawthorne  I  am  unable  to  explain : 
in  the  course  of  his  work  he  never  sought  or 
found  expression  in  verse.  In  this  respect  I  take 
him  to  have  been  somewhat  peculiar  among  im 
aginative  writers  of  the  first  class.  We  know  what 
Scott  did  in  that  line,  not  only  in  his  longer  poems, 
but  in  his  romances,  —  such  lyrics  as  the  "  Song  of 
Rebecca,"  and  jingles  still  as  popular  as  the  "Health 
to  King  Charles."  Dickens  not  only  wrote  a  vol 
ume  or  so  of  verse,  but  among  his  early  indiscre 
tions  he  gave  us  the  "  Long  Ballad  of  Lord  Bate- 
man,"  and  in  "  Pickwick "  he  broke  forth  in  the 
"Ivy  Green."  Thackeray  not  only  indited  that 
familiar  "  Chronicle  of  the  Drum,"  but  his  ballads 
of  "  Bouillabaise,"  the  "  Cane-Bottom'd  Chair,"  and 
the  "  Age  of  Wisdom  "  were  fifty  years  ago  in  the 
mouths  of  every  college  student,  and  I  sincerely 
hope  they  are  also  in  the  mouths  of  their  succes 
sors  still.  But  I  am  not  aware  that  Hawthorne 
ever  turned  a  couplet.  If  anything  of  the  kind  is 
to  be  found  in  his  writings  I  fail  to  recall  it.  I 


THE  WAYSIDE  65 

wish  I  could  recall  it,  for  the  absence  thereof  is 
suggestive  of  a  limitation. 

Yet  while  verse  and  Hawthorne  do  not  seem  to 
go  together,  Hawthorne  was  in  no  way  devoid  of 
fancy.  Swift,  for  instance,  with  abundance  of  im 
agination  in  a  way,  —  bear  witness  Gulliver,  —  had 
no  delicacy  of  fancy,  and  yet  he  turned  off  endless 
verses,  though  no  poetry.  Hawthorne  apparently 
never  felt  any  call  that  way.  Yet  Hawthorne's 
fancy  was  delightful,  finding  its  expression  even 
among  the  realistic  New  England  surroundings, 
and  actually  burgeoning  into  life  in  an  English  or 
Italian  environment.  In  Rome  and  at  Warwick  it 
is  as  delicate  in  its  expression  as  the  tracery  of 
December's  frost-work  on  a  window-pane. 

I  have  now  passed  in  review  those  elements  which 
to  my  mind  most  enter  into  what  constitutes  emi 
nence  in  literature  as  art.  Now  let  me  speak  of 
recognition.  As  respects  general  recognition,  how 
does  Hawthorne  stand  ?  Let  me  premise ;  recog 
nition  and  popularity  are  two  very  different  things. 
Hawthorne  never  was,  nor  is  he  now,  a  popular 
author.  And  this  suggests  one  more  discursion. 
A  good  many  years  ago,  at  a  dinner  of  one  of 
those  clubs  in  which  Boston  abounds,  —  not  this 
time  the  Saturday  Club,  —  a  gentleman  startled 
the  company  —  and  it  was  a  company  of  prominent 
literati,  lawyers,  physicians,  and  clergymen  —  by 
suddenly  asking  if  any  of  those  present  thought 


66  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

he  could  name  any  one  of  the  three  most  popular 
writers  of  the  day,  as  judged  by  the  test  of  demand 
at  the  desk  of  the  Boston  Public  Library.  The 
guessing  at  once  began,  and  every  well-known 
name  in  English  literature  was  suggested  from 
Shakespeare  to  Scott,  Dickens,  Cooper,  and  Long 
fellow  to  Tupper.  The  mention  of  each  was  met 
by  a  negative,  and  a  call  to  guess  again.  Finally 
the  conundrum  was  given  up  in  despair,  and  its 
solution  demanded.  Its  propounder  then  proceeded 
to  inform  the  astonished  company  that  the  English 
writers  far  and  away  the  most  in  demand  in  Bos 
ton  —  in  comparison  with  whom  Shakespeare  and 
Walter  Scott,  Dickens,  George  Eliot,  and  Wilkie 
Collins  simply  "  were  not  in  it " —  were  Mary  Jane 
Holmes,  Caroline  Lee  Hentz,  and  Mrs.  E.  D.  E.  N. 
Southworth  !  —  names  not  one  of  which  had  any 
member  of  that  company  ever  heard  before.  Now, 
in  matters  of  art,  taste,  and  literature  many  rules 
and  canons  have,  first  and  last,  been  laid  down,  and 
some  of  them  have  stood  the  test  of  time  while 
others  have  not ;  but  one  of  those  rules  I  take  to  be 
indisputable,  and  as  such  eternal :  it  is  that  in  mat 
ters  of  literature,  taste,  and  art  the  majority  is  always 
wrong !  In  this  democratic  vox  populi,  vox  Dei 
community  of  ours  this  may  sound  at  first  somewhat 
heterodoxical,  to  apply  to  it  no  harsher  epithet ; 
but  none  the  less  it  must  in  the  nature  of  things 
be  so,  and  not  otherwise.  Hawthorne  is  a  case  in 


THE  WAYSIDE  67 

point.  He  represents  probably  in  a  more  complete 
degree  than  any  other  American  writer  the  most 
perfect  art  in  literature.  That  he  is  popular,  in  the 
usual  sense  of  the  term,  no  one  will  claim ;  he  is, 
however,  more  and  more  appreciated  among  those 
whose  judgment  counts  most  on  questions  aesthetic, 
those  whom  Shakespeare  denominates  "the  judi 
cious,"  the  applause  of  one  of  which  should  out 
weigh  the  censure  of  a  whole  theatre  of  others.  As 
I  have  already  said,  fifty  years'  acceptance  consti 
tutes  the  classic's  test.  "  The  Scarlet  Letter  "  was 
published  four  and  fifty  years  ago.  Passing  the 
limit,  it  has  borne  the  test.  It  is  forty  years  since 
Hawthorne  died.  No  one,  I  think,  will  be  likely  to 
say  me  nay  when  I  assert  that  Hawthorne's  fame, 
perhaps  even  his  vogue,  has  risen  with  the  passage 
of  every  year  since  he  ceased  to  be. 

Victor  Hugo,  it  is  said,  was  once  remonstrated 
with  for  writing  so  much.  There  was  in  his  reply 
a  certain  force.  "  My  business,"  he  is  reported  to 
have  said,  "  is  to  write  ;  it  will  be  the  business  of 
posterity  to  decide  what  of  my  writings  is  worth 
preserving."  The  great  difficulty  I  now  find  with 
authors  is  the  amount  of  literary  rubbish  they  thus 
dump,  so  to  speak,  at  the  feet  of  posterity.  How 
does  Hawthorne  stand  in  this  regard  ?  Let  us  look 
at  the  others.  We  will  pass  Shakespeare  and  the 
classics,  including  Voltaire,  bowed  under  the  weight 
of  his  hundred  volumes,  and  come  at  once  to  the 


68  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

moderns,  —  the  nineteenth  century  culprits.  The 
situation,  bad  at  best,  is  sorely  aggravated  by  what 
may  not  unfairly  be  described  as  the  scavenger 
publication  methods  now  in  vogue,  —  the  "only 
Complete  Edition"  mania.  The  periodical  and 
magazine  chiffonier  permits  no  pot-boiling  rag  to 
escape  his  hook !  Take,  for  instance,  Byron.  Could 
Byron  be  consulted,  I  have  little  doubt  he  would, 
in  his  better  advised  conditions,  pray  that  nine 
tenths  of  all  he  ever  wrote  might,  on  the  ground  of 
quality  alone,  be  permitted  to  lapse  into  a  merciful 
oblivion.  It  is  turgid  stuff  —  mere  melodramatic 
mouthing.  Yet  to-day  they  are  with  infinite  edi 
torial  research  and  skill  bringing  out  a  new  and 
enlarged  edition  of  Byron  in  which  everything  he 
ever  penned  is  unburied,  and  put  in  type.  Only  the 
other  day  I  came  across  an  elaborate  review  of 
this  last  publishing  disinterment,  and  at  its  close 
I  read  this  summary:  "Whatever  our  individual 
tastes  and  proclivities  may  be,  to  ignore  the  pre 
eminence  of  Byron  in  the  literature  of  last  century 
is  to  write  ourselves  down  —  well,  we  need  not 
say  what."  I  am  sorry  to  so  write  myself  down  in 
the  opinion  of  the  "  Athenaeum's  "  critic ;  but  after 
a  somewhat  careful  recent  reading  of  Byron's  mas 
terpiece,  "  Childe  Harold,"  —  and  that  fresh  from 
Greece,  —  I  must  confess  to  having  felt  amazed  as 
well  as  disgusted  at  the  small  residuum  of  true 
poetry  I  found  in  it.  Of  its  five  hundred  stanzas  not 


THE  WAYSIDE  69 

fifty  were  free  from  empty  posing  for  effect.  The 
world  would,  I  concluded,  sustain  no  appreciable 
loss  were  the  poet's  dozen  volumes  reduced  to  one. 

So  of  Wordsworth  —  the  Showman  of  Nature. 
I  recently  read  the  "  Excursion  "  while  journeying 
in  the  Westmoreland  country.  It  was  Wordsworth, 
not  Byron,  who  in  my  judgment  was  in  influence 
preeminent  in  the  last  century's  literature.  But  I 
also  with  confidence  assert,  life  is  not  long  enough 
for  the  full  reading  of  Wordsworth  now.  But 
could  I  do  so,  I  would  allot  to  him  two  volumes  for 
Byron's  one. 

And  Walter  Scott!  Do  you  realize  how  the 
world's  stock  of  "classics"  is  accumulating?  I 
will  not  ask  if  any  person  here  has  ever  read 
through  that  famous  novel,  "  Sir  Charles  Grandi- 
son,"  for  I  know  in  advance  no  one  has ;  how  can 
such  a  book  become  other  than  a  name  ?  The  other 
day  I  set  a  familiar  spirit  of  mine  at  work  to  ap 
proximate  the  amount  of  certain  writers'  works, 
and  to  estimate  in  some  degree  the  proportions  they 
bore  to  each  other.  The  result  was  little  short  of 
appalling.  Cooper,  I  found,  was  responsible  for 
some  seven  millions  of  words ;  Scott  was  a  good 
second  with  six  and  a  half  millions  ;  and  Dickens, 
Thackeray,  and  Irving  followed  with  some  four  to 
five  millions  each.  Five  familiar  authors  represent 
ing  some  five  and  twenty  millions  of  words  !  The 
existence  of  that  familiar  and  often  referred  to 


70  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

personage  usually  known  as  "  every  well-read  man 
or  woman  "is  in  the  future  undeniably  disheart 
ening  ! 

I  will  not  enter  into  any  computation  as  to  the 
proportion  of  the  enormous  output  of  the  five  au 
thors  just  named  the  world  could  well  afford  to 
spare ;  but  I  can  hardly  imagine  any  one  of  the  five 
contemplating,  as  life  closed,  such  an  unwieldy  bulk 
of  baggage  without  infinite  sadness.  For  example, 
take  Thackeray,  a  man  who  had  a  full  sense,  I 
believe,  of  the  responsibility  of  authorship.  They 
have  recently  been  industriously  disinterring  what 
may  best  be  described  as  his  early  pot-boilers,  — 
matter  he  wrote  in  his  immature  period  in  order  to 
get  the  wherewithal  to  sustain  life.  Gladly  would 
he  forget  it,  —  as  he  believed  it  forgotten !  The  so- 
called  "  Biographical  Edition  "  of  his  writings  is  in 
thirteen  very  solid  volumes,  —  edited  by  members 
of  his  family ;  yet  when  Thackeray  laid  down  his 
pen  at  the  last  line  of  "  Henry  Esmond,"  he  had 
delivered  his  full  message  to  mankind.  In  "  Barry 
Lyndon,"  "  Vanity  Fair,"  "  Pendennis,"  and  "  Es 
mond  "  he  had  told  all  he  had  to  say ;  the  rest  is 
hardly  more  than  repetition,  in  words  slightly 
varied.  The  thirteen  volumes  had  better  have  been 
five.  Dickens  might  almost  equally  well  have  died 
when  he  finished  "  David  Copperfield."  He  after 
wards  added  much  to  his  works,  but  little  to  his 
fame. 


THE  WAYSIDE  71 

In  this  respect,  it  is  otherwise  with  Hawthorne. 
His  work  is  in  bulk  less  than  half  that  of  any  of 
the  others  I  have  named;  nor  did  he  ever  write 
himself  out.  Passing  away  betimes,  I  think  the 
world  would  sustain  a  distinct  loss  were  any  mate 
rial  portion  of  what  he  wrote  obliterated.  Of  course, 
"  Fanshawe,"  the  "  Life  of  Franklin  Pierce,"  and 
the  two  incomplete  romances  published  after  his 
death,  I  do  not  include.  "  Our  Old  Home  "  was 
practically  his  last  production ;  as  also  it  was  that 
one  of  his  productions  which  the  world  would  least 
willingly  let  die. 

And  speaking  of  "  Our  Old  Home  "  reminds  me 
of  two  little  incidents  connected  with  its  publica 
tion  which,  at  the  time,  afforded  me  amusement  and 
gratification,  and  which  I  have  since  recalled  with 
unusual  distinctness.  They  occurred  in  London. 
"  Our  Old  Home  "  was,  you  will  remember,  pub 
lished  in  the  summer  of  1863, —  in  the  midst  of  our 
Civil  War,  and  when  the  British  Philistine  main 
tained  towards  the  American  —  especially  of  the 
North  —  an  attitude  of  superiority,  and  an  aspect 
of  sanctimonious  arrogance  which  would,  to  use  a 
strong  simile  borrowed  from  my  friend  the  late 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  have  been  offensive  if  assumed 
by  God  Almighty  to  a  black  beetle.  I  chanced 
shortly  after  to  be  in  England,  —  an  army  inter 
lude  of  mine.  Simultaneously  with  the  publication 
of  "  Our  Old  Home  "  an  English  writer  of  much 


72  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

vogue  at  the  time,  Mr.  George  Augustus  Sala,  was 
bringing  out  through  the  columns  of  the  "  Tele 
graph  "  a  series  of  letters  from  America,  which  he 
a  few  months  later  published  in  permanent  form 
under  the  title,  "  My  Diary  in  America  in  the  Midst 
of  War."1  The  letters,  certainly  nothing  to  be 
proud  of,  were  of  course  very  severe  on  America, 
and  all  things  American.  The  commotion  excited 
in  Great  Britain  by  "  Our  Old  Home  "  when  first 
it  came  out  is  not  yet  forgotten  ;  it  still  faintly 
echoes  from  the  past.  The  British  female  was  espe 
cially  incensed  at  certain  references  to  her  own 
physical  attributes.  One  day  I  was  discussing  the 
matter  with  the  first  Duchess  of  Argyll,  an  excel 
lent  friend  of  America,  and  expressed  my  sur 
prise  at  the  sensitiveness  her  country  people  seemed 
to  show  under  Hawthorne's  bantering  criticism; 
and,  in  doing  so,  I  referred  to  what  we  had  to  un- 

1  In  this  book  there  is  a  passage  (vol.  ii,  pp.  23-25)  referring 
to  Hawthorne.  Sala  says  :  "  In  one  of  my  earlier  letters  home  I 
had  animadverted  somewhat  strongly  (but  with  a  loving  admira 
tion  of  the  man's  genius  and  character)  on  the  curious  strictures 
he  had  passed  on  English  women."  He  adds  :  "  He  was  certainly 
a  very  eccentric  person.  Nobody  ever  saw  him  read  ;  no  one  knew 
where  he  had  studied  his  characters  or  gathered  his  incidents  ;  yet 
he  could  scarcely  have  evolved  the  '  Blithedale  Romance  '  or  '  The 
House  of  Seven  Gables  '  from  his  own  internal  consciousness, 
as  the  German  critics  evolved  the  camel.  A  friend  who  knew  him 
well  told  me  that  on  his  shelves  Hawthorne  had  not  twenty  vol 
umes,  and  that  these  even  were  of  the  most  ordinary  kind.  Yet 
was  he  as  great  a  writer  of  pure  and  sounding  and  nervous  English 
as  Dryden,  and  Swift,  and  Tillotson." 


THE  WAYSIDE  73 

dergo  in  that  line,  specifying  a  peculiarly  offensive 
letter  of  Sala's  which  had  appeared  in  that  very 
morning's  "Telegraph."  But,  I  said,  we  bore  it 
all  with  equanimity  ;  perhaps  because  we  were  used 
to  it !  Never  shall  I  forget  the  keen  sense  of  satis 
faction  I  derived  from  her  Grace's  reply;  it  was 
so  simple,  so  evidently  expressing  what  she  really 
felt : —  "  Yes,"  she  said,  "  but  really,  in  considering 
our  feelings,  you  ought  to  take  into  some  account 
the  very  different  calibre  of  the  two  men !  "  That 
difference  was  indeed  very  much  in  evidence,  — 
more  so  now  than  then  ;  but  at  the  time,  and  under 
the  circumstances,  this  outspoken  admission  that 
the  weight  of  metal  was  obviously  on  despised 
America's  side  was  as  balm  to  my  sorely  lacerated 
soul.  I  saw  Hawthorne  in  a  new  and  very  sur 
prising  light,  as  our  champion  bruiser  in  the  inter 
national  literary  prize  ring  !  And  to  him  the  belt 
was  conceded ! 

The  other  incident,  also  in  connection  with  "  Our 
Old  Home,"  was  characteristic,  as  well  as  amusing. 
I  was  again  talking  with  an  elderly  lady  of  rank 
and  prominence,  and  certain  French  authors  con 
stituted  our  theme.  Suddenly  I  was  paralyzed  by 
the  remark  that,  "  You  in  America  have  one  de 
lightful  author  who  seems  to  me  very  French  — 
your  Mr.  Hawthorne ! "  I  simply  gasped,  as  I  si 
lently  pondered.  What  my  British  matron  had  in 
mind  was  plain  enough.  The  remark  was  strictly 


74  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

insular.  What  was  not  English,  was  foreign ;  and 
what  was  foreign,  must  needs  be  French.  But  that 
Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  of  all  men  on  earth  native 
to  New  England,  and  of  the  soil  racy,  should  be 
characterized  as  "  French  "  did  overcome  me  as 
a  summer  cloud,  exciting  silent  as  well  as  special 
wonder. 

There  is  a  comparison  possible  to  be  made  be 
tween  two  men,  which  I  do  not  remember  ever  to 
have  seen  drawn  —  both  New  Englanders,  both 
artists,  the  one  of  the  brush,  the  other  of  the  pen, 
and  each  the  most  eminent  in  his  field  America  has 
even  yet  produced.  Hawthorne  was  of  course  one  ; 
the  other  was  John  Singleton  Copley.  Both  were 
born  and  grew  up  amid  New  England  surround 
ings,  —  its  thin,  sharp  air,  its  inartistic,  conven 
tional  life.  For  either  literature  or  art  the  atmos 
phere  was  arid  ;  it  lacked  the  nutritious  element. 
Copley  went  from  Boston  to  Europe  in  1774,  at 
the  age  of  thirty-seven ;  Hawthorne  in  1853,  at 
forty-nine.  It  is  most  suggestive  to  note  the  effect 
of  the  new  and  older  environment  on  each.  Every 
one  is  familiar  with  the  difference  between  Copley's 
earlier  and  his  later  style.  His  American  portraits 
were  stiff,  formal,  and  almost  wooden.  They  re 
flected  the  conditions  in  which  he  was  born,  had 
grown  up,  and  wherein  he  wrought.  In  Europe  he 
burgeoned  out,  and  his  great  canvases  representing 
the  Death  of  Major  Pier  son,  the  Eepulse  of  the 


THE  WAYSIDE  75 

Spanish  at  Gibraltar,  and  the  Attempted  Arrest  of 
the  Five  Members,  were  the  result.  He  worked  un 
der  more  stimulating,  more  sympathetic  conditions. 
It  was  exactly  the  same  with  Hawthorne  ;  and  I 
know  of  few  records  of  deeper  significance  than 
this  passage  from  the  preface  to  "  The  Marble 
Faun :  "  "  No  author,  without  a  trial,  can  conceive 
of  the  difficulty  of  writing  a  romance  about  a  coun 
try  where  there  is  no  shadow,  no  antiquity,  no  mys 
tery,  no  picturesque  and  gloomy  wrong,  nor  anything 
but  a  commonplace  prosperity,  in  broad  and  sim 
ple  daylight,  as  is  happily  the  case  with  my  own 
dear  native  land.  .  .  .  Romance  and  poetry,  ivy, 
lichens,  and  wall-flowers  need  ruin  to  make  them 
grow." 

And  now  for  my  resume.  The  most  magnificent 
compliment  ever  to  my  knowledge  paid  to  a  writer 
of  fiction  was  that  familiar  one  paid  by  Gibbon  to 
Fielding,  —  by  the  historian  of  the  "  Decline  and 
Fall "  to  the  author  of  "  Tom  Jones."  "  Our  im 
mortal  Fielding,"  he  wrote,  "  was  of  the  younger 
branch  of  the  Earls  of  Denbigh,  who  drew  their 
origin  from  the  Counts  of  Hapsburg.  The  suc 
cessors  of  Charles  V  may  disdain  their  brethren 
of  England,  but  the  romance  of  '  Tom  Jones,'  that 
exquisite  picture  of  humor  and  manners,  will  out 
live  the  Palace  of  the  Escurial  and  the  Imperial 
Eagle  of  Austria." 

So  in  closing  my  contribution  here  at  this  cen- 


76  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

tenary,  I  say  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  what  I  said 
forty-nine  years  ago,  and  at  my  beginning  to-day, 
that  in  my  judgment  he  stands  preeminent  among 
American  literary  artists ;  and  his  name  may  well 
challenge  enrollment  in  that  galaxy  of  great  lu 
minaries  in  which  are  included  Shakespeare  and 
Addison,  Defoe,  Fielding  and  Goldsmith,  Scott, 
Thackeray  and  Dickens.  Thinking  this,  I  also 
think  that  what  Edward  Gibbon  wrote  of  Henry 
Fielding  might  more  truly  be  changed,  and  thus 
applied  to  Hawthorne  :  —  The  legend  of  the  Scarlet 
Letter,  that  exquisite  picture  of  an  earlier  time  with 
its  manners  and  morals,  will,  even  more  than  the 
romance  of  "  Tom  Jones,"  "  outlive  the  Palace  of 
the  Escurial  and  the  Imperial  Eagle  of  Austria." 


THIRD  DAY 
JULY  SIXTH 


THIRD  DAY 

JULY  SIXTH 

MRS.  JULIA  WARD  HOWE  presided  over  the 
exercises  of  the  third  day,  which  also  were  held  in 
the  Hillside  Chapel. 

MRS.  HOWE  :  I  am  very  glad  to  have  the 
honor  and  pleasure  of  presiding  over  the  exercises 
of  to-day,  and  when  I  came  here  to  the  chapel  yes 
terday  my  first  thought  was,  "  What  can  I  say  here 
that  will  be  as  eloquent  as  this  chapel  is  to  me," 
remembering  those  delightful  days  of  the  Sum 
mer  School  of  Philosophy,  remembering  the  august 
faces  that  we  saw  then  and  shall  see  no  more,  and 
remembering  the  words  of  wisdom  that  we  heard, 
some  of  which,  I  dare  say,  abide  with  us  still. 
Traveling  all  over  this  United  States,  I  have  found 
in  very  distant  places  people,  particularly  women, 
who  had  attended  a  meeting  or  meetings  of  that 
school  of  philosophy,  and  who  were  harking  back  to 
it  as  a  great  source  of  inspiration  and  instruction. 
And  I  trust  that  the  people  of  Concord  will  al 
ways  keep  this  as  a  sort  of  sacred  temple.  Having 
once  been  consecrated  by  the  presence  of  Emer 
son,  Alcott,  and  so  many  others,  it  ought  never  to 


80  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

be  allowed  to  fall  either  into  decay  or  disuse.  That 
is  what  I  have  to  say  about  this  place.  Mr.  Haw 
thorne  never  saw  this  temple,  but  I  am  sure  he 
would  have  been  pleased  to  be  spoken  of  here  as 
he  has  been,  as  you  all  remember  Mr.  Adams  spoke 
of  him  yesterday. 

I  now  have  the  pleasure  of  introducing  to  you 
Mrs.  Maud  Howe  Elliott,  who  will  give  you  some 
account  of  "  Hawthorne  in  Italy." 

ADDKESS   OF  MKS.    MAUD   HOWE   ELLIOTT 

When  Hawthorne  arrived  in  Koine  in  January  of 
the  year  1858,  "the  French  soldiers  were  prominent 
objects  everywhere  about  the  city."  He  tells  us  in 
his  journal  that  "  they  make  up  more  of  the  sight 
and  sound  of  the  city  than  anything  else  that  lives." 
Hawthorne's  first  impressions  of  Rome  were  unplea 
sant.  The  weather  was  detestable,  one  of  those  cold 
wet  winters  the  Romans  sometimes  have  to  endure. 
To  the  stranger  who  cannot  guess  how  short  a  time, 
compared  to  most  other  places,  the  bad  weather 
lasts,  such  a  season  is  particularly  depressing.  The 
Hawthornes  arrived  at  midnight  on  the  24th  of 
January,  and  were  uncomfortably  housed  at  Spill- 
man's,  the  only  hotel  where  they  could  gain  admit 
tance.  Here  they  stayed  until  they  found  their 
apartment  at  the  Palazzo  Larazani,  Via  Porta  Pin- 
ciana,  not  far  from  the  Villa  Malta.  If  Hawthorne 
could  have  looked  forward  a  few  months  to  the 


THE  WAYSIDE  81 

third  week  of  April,  when  the  great  wall  of  the  Villa 
Malta,  rising  high  above  the  street,  is  one  splendid 
blushing  precipice  of  roses,  he  might  have  been 
somewhat  comforted,  but  he  had  not  yet  made 
friends  with  the  genial  Roman  Americans,  of  whom 
he  later  became  so  fond,  any  one  of  whom  might  have 
cheered  him  with  prophecies  of  "  the  good  time 
coming."  He  sat  in  the  corner  by  the  fireside  with 
more  clothes  on  than  he  had  ever  worn  before,  his 
thickest  great-coat  over  all,  getting  what  comfort 
he  could  out  of  the  tiny  blaze  coaxed  from  the 
penny  fagots  swallowed  up  in  the  vast  chimney  of 
the  Palazzo  Larazani.  No  wonder  he  sighed  for 
the  great  logs  of  New  England  to  feed  the  fire ! 

Nobody  who  has  not  experienced  what  Haw 
thorne  went  through  in  those  first  Roman  weeks 
can  quite  understand  the  feeling  of  distaste,  almost 
of  despair,  that  Rome  aroused  in  him.  It  is  im 
possible  for  a  person  who  feels  the  motion  of  the 
steamer  which  is  carrying  him  over  the  heaving 
ocean  to  appreciate  the  immense  splendor  of  water 
and  sky  spread  before  his  dizzy  eyes.  It  is  just  as 
impossible  to  feel  the  golden  charm  of  Rome  while 
one  is  pinched  by  the  cruel  cold  of  a  first  winter 
here.  The  poor  pampered  American  body,  accus 
tomed  to  furnace-heated  houses,  is  tortured  with 
cold  and  chill ;  for  a  time  it  masters  the  most 
valiant  spirit.  When  one's  chief  occupation  is 
stoking  a  sulky  fire  with  green  fagots,  and  one's 


82  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

chief  preoccupation  how  to  warm  feet  chilled  by 
marble  or  tiled  floors  without  raising  chilblains 
upon  them,  it  is  useless  to  try  to  lift  one's  soul  to 
better  and  higher  things. 

Side  by  side  with  the  Giant  Cold  stood  the  Giant 
Dirt.  Cold  and  Dirt,  the  two  giants  who  seemed 
to  bar  the  path  of  the  new  arrivals,  to  keep  them 
from  the  rich  enjoyment  that  all  the  time  was  wait 
ing  for  them  —  Cold  and  Dirt,  two  hard  things  for 
a  Puritan  to  accept,  —  all  through  Hawthorne's 
Italian  journals  and  letters  we  find  constant  pro 
tests  against  them. 

Soon,  very  soon,  things  began  to  improve.  On 
the  7th  of  February  he  writes,  "  I  have  been  four 
or  five  times  to  St.  Peter's,  and  always  with  plea 
sure,  because  there  is  such  a  delightful,  summer- 
like  warmth  the  moment  we  pass  beneath  the  heavy 
padded  leather  curtains." 

On  the  12th  of  February  Hawthorne  makes  a 
note  of  having  called  "  at  the  Palazzo  Barberini, 
where  William  Story  has  established  himself  and 
family  for  the  next  seven  years  or  more  in  apart 
ments  that  afford  a  fine  outlook  over  Rome  and 
have  the  sun  in  them  most  of  the  day.  Mrs.  Story 
invited  us  to  her  fancy  ball,  but  we  declined." 

A  few  months  before,  the  Storys  had  moved  into 
their  splendid  apartment  in  the  Palazzo  Barberini, 
of  which  Mr.  Story  wrote  to  Mr.  Norton,  "  The 
Principe  (Barberini)  has  shown  very  good  will  to 


THE  WAYSIDE  83 

have  us  come,  and  will  put  the  whole  apartment  in 
complete  order  and  let  it  to  us  for  two  hundred  and 
fifty  dollars  less  than  the  rent  we  receive  for  our 
little  house  in  Bussey  Place.  I  never  saw  anything 
more  rambling  than  the  upper  rooms  above  the 
apartment,  which  are  included  in  the  lease.  They 
are  legion  in  number,  and  crop  out  at  every  new 
visit.  I  should  think  there  were  some  twenty  at 
least,  of  every  kind  and  shape  going  oddly  about, 
up  little  stairs,  through  curious  holes,  into  strange 
lumber  rooms,  and  then  suddenly  opening  into  largo 
and  admirable  chambers." 

In  these  large  and  admirable  chambers,  Haw 
thorne  was  to  gather  materials  for  one  phase  of  that 
man3^-sided  book,  "  The  Marble  Faun."  If  the  fancy 
ball  was  declined,  many  other  invitations  were  ac 
cepted.  All  through  the  Italian  journals  constant 
reference  is  made  to  William  Story,  at  that  time  the 
most  prominent  figure  of  the  American  colony  at 
Rome.  The  Hawthornes  came  to  Rome  at  a  tre 
mendously  interesting  moment,  veritably  in  the 
golden  age  of  the  American  colony,  then  almost 
exclusively  made  up  of  artists,  men  and  women  who 
were  a  real  power  in  the  place,  and  whose  influence 
on  things  Italian  and  American  has  yet  to  be  fully 
recognized.  The  Palazzo  Barberini  was  one  of  the 
favorite  meeting  grounds  of  the  English  and  Amer 
ican  artists  and  of  the  travelers  of  the  same  na 
tionalities,  who  in  those  days  came  to  Rome  to  spend 


84  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

the  winter,  who  made  friends  with  the  artists,  and 
few  of  whom  left  Rome  without  ordering  a  statue 
or  buying  a  picture  from  their  countrymen.  Haw 
thorne  notices  in  his  diary,  on  the  staircase  leading 
to  the  Barberini,  "  the  ancient  Greek  bas-relief  of  a 
lion  from  whence  Canova  is  supposed  to  have  taken 
the  idea  of  his  lions  on  the  monument  in  St.  Peter's." 
It  is  of  this  bas-relief  that  the  familiar  witticism 
was  made,  that  it  was  the  only  lion  in  Rome  that  had 
never  gone  up  Mrs.  Story's  staircase. 

Hawthorne  meets  Mr.  C.  G.  Thompson,  the 
painter  whom  he  had  known  in  Boston,  and  takes 
more  pleasure  in  his  pictures  than  in  the  old  masters, 
in  whose  work  he  was  at  first  bitterly  disappointed. 
He  goes  to  the  Villa  Negroni,  then  a  sad  place  to 
visit,  for  Crawford  had  lately  died;  and  though 
Hawthorne  did  not  like  him,  and  did  not  do  justice 
to  his  talent,  he  is  touched  at  seeing  the  unfinished 
work.  He  says,  "  It  is  rather  sad  to  think  that 
Crawford  died  before  he  could  see  his  ideas  in  the 
marble,  where  they  gleam  with  so  pure  and  celes 
tial  a  light  as  compared  to  the  plaster.  There  is 
almost  as  much  difference  as  between  flesh  and 
spirit/' 

He  dines  with  Mr.  T.  B.  Read,  the  poet  and  art 
ist,  with  a  party  composed  of  painters  and  sculptors, 
the  only  exception  being  the  American  banker,  Mr. 
Hooker,  and  an  American  tourist  who  had  given 
Read  a  commission.  Hawthorne  sat  next  to  Gibson, 


THE  WAYSIDE  85 

the  English  sculptor,  who  he  supposes  "  stands 
foremost  in  his  profession  at  this  day."  Later  on, 
when  he  has  the  opportunity  of  judging,  Hawthorne 
seems  to  disagree  with  this  popular  verdict,  as  he 
more  than  once  inveighs  against  Mr.  Gibson's  nu 
dities  and  his  habit  of  tinting  his  statues,  which 
Gibson  held  was  the  custom  of  the  Greeks.  We  now 
know  that  he  was  right,  but  at  that  time  most  con 
noisseurs  hooted  at  his  theory.  Hawthorne  speaks 
of  Gibson's  dislike  to  any  reference  to  his  age. 
When  the  old  sculptor,  who  had  then  been  in  Rome 
thirty-seven  years,  went  to  England,  he  was  invited 
to  dine  with  the  Queen  at  Windsor.  Stories  of  that 
royal  dinner  are  still  told  in  Rome  among  the  Eng 
lish  painters.  Gibson,  an  inveterate  old  bachelor, 
and  used  to  the  manners  of  the  Roman  trattoria, 
when  he  was  seated  at  the  Queen's  table,  absently 
took  up  his  napkin  and  polished  his  glass,  spoon, 
and  knife,  running  the  tines  of  his  fork  through  the 
royal  damask  napkin.  The  Queen,  who  had  heard 
of  his  extreme  sensitiveness  on  the  matter  of  his  age, 
had  made  a  wager  that  she  would  find  how  old  he 
was ;  so  she  bluntly  asked  him.  The  canny  old  fel 
low  made  a  deep  bow  and  answered,  "  That,  marm, 
is  something  that  I  have  never  told  any  lady." 

Hawthorne  meets  Hamilton  Wilde,  di  memoria 
benedetta^of.  blessed  memory,  as  the  Italians  say,  and 
waxes  enthusiastic  about  his  paintings  and  about 
those  of  another  American,  George  L.  Brown.  He 


86  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

visits  the  studio  of  one  Miiller,  a  Swiss  painter,  and 
frankly  confesses  to  preferring  the  pictures  by  this 
trio  of  moderns  to  any  of  the  old  masters,  and  we 
like  him  all  the  better  for  saying  so.  "  I  suppose," 
Hawthorne  writes,  "  Claude  was  a  greater  painter 
than  Brown,  but  I  should  prefer  one  of  the  latter's 
pictures.  Mr.  Brown  showed  us  some  drawings  from 
nature  done  with  incredible  care  and  minuteness. 
We  complimented  him  on  his  patience,  but  he  said, 
4  Oh,  it 's  not  patience,  it 's  only  just  love.' " 

In  the  room  where  I  write  these  words  hangs  a 
drawing  of  two  stone  pines  on  an  Italian  road 
side,  with  a  glimpse  of  the  sea  beyond,  suggesting 
the  neighborhood  of  Porta  d'  Anzio.  It  is  signed 
G.  L.  Brown,  Home,  1852.  Perhaps  it  is  one  of 
the  drawings  Hawthorne  saw  and  admired.  It  has 
stood  the  test  of  time,  and  deserves  to-day  all  that 
Hawthorne  said  about  Brown's  work.  On  the  25th 
of  March  Hawthorne  has  breakfast  with  Story, 
and  writes  him  down  as  "  one  of  the  most  agree 
able  men  I  know  in  society."  April  22  they  make 
their  first  visit  to  the  Capitol.  "We  afterwards 
went  into  the  sculpture  gallery,  where  I  looked 
at  the  Faun  of  Praxiteles,  and  was  sensible  of  a 
peculiar  charm  in  it ;  a  sylvan  beauty  and  homeli 
ness,  friendly  and  wild  at  once.  The  lengthened 
but  not  preposterous  ears,  and  the  little  tail  which 
we  infer,  has  an  exquisite  effect,  and  makes  the 
spectator  smile  in  his  very  heart.  The  race  of  fauns 


THE  WAYSIDE  87 

was  the  most  delightful  of  all  that  antiquity  im 
agined.  It  seems  to  me  that  a  story,  with  all  sorts 
of  fun  and  pathos  in  it,  might  be  contrived  on  the 
idea  of  their  having  intermingled  with  the  human 
race,  .  .  .  the  pretty  hairy  ears  should  occasionally 
reappear  in  members  of  the  family ;  and  the  moral 
instincts  and  intellectual  characteristics  of  the 
faun  might  be  most  picturesquely  brought  out  with 
out  detriment  to  the  human  interest  of  the  story." 
This  is  the  first  hint  that  we  have  of  the  advent  of 
Donatello,  the  last  descendant  of  the  Monte  Benes, 
and  one  of  the  most  insistent  of  the  ghosts  of 
Home. 

They  have  tea  with  Miss  Bremer,  "  the  funniest 
little  old  fairy  you  can  imagine."  April  27  they 
visit  Castellane,  the  jeweler,  and  see  his  won 
derful  treasures,  both  the  reproductions  and  the 
originals  of  ancient  Etruscan  and  Roman  jewels. 
On  the  8th  of  May  Hawthorne  again  lunches  with 
the  Story s  to  meet  Mrs.  Jameson ;  but  that  lady 
being  absent  on  account  of  a  headache,  he  goes  in 
the  course  of  the  afternoon  to  call  upon  her,  in 
company  with  his  wife  and  Mrs.  Story,  and  finds 
her  "on  the  first  piano  of  an  old  palazzo  in  the 
Via  di  Ripetta,  nearly  opposite  to  the  ferry-way 
across  the  Tiber,  and  affording  a  pleasant  view  of 
the  yellow  river  and  the  green  bank  and  fields  on 
the  other  side."  "  She  began  to  talk  with  us  with 
affectionate  familiarity,  and  was  particularly  kind 


88  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

towards  myself,  who  on  my  part  was  equally  gra 
cious  towards  her.  In  truth,  I  have  found  great 
pleasure  and  profit  in  her  works,  and  was  glad  to 
hear  her  say  that  she  liked  mine."  On  the  9th  of 
May,  Hawthorne  goes  for  a  long  drive,  apparently 
alone  with  Mrs.  Jameson,  whom  he  finds  a  sensi 
ble  old  lady.  They  drive  past  the  tomb  of  Cecilia 
Metella  and  along  the  Appian  Way.  "  We  drove 
homeward,  looking  at  the  distant  dome  of  St. 
Peter's,  and  talking  of  many  things, — painting, 
sculpture,  America,  England,  spiritualism,  and 
whatever  else  came  up." 

As  the  journal  goes  on  day  by  day,  its  tone 
softens,  Hawthorne  finds  more  and  more  to  admire 
and  enjoy,  less  to  criticise  and  condemn.  Rome, 
the  old  enchantress,  is  getting  him  in  her  toils  as 
she  has  us  all  sooner  or  later.  We  feel  the  amelio 
ration  of  his  opinions,  the  broadening  of  his  view, 
a  tremendous  growth  and  unfolding  of  the  social 
side  of  his  nature.  He  speaks  of  one  conversation 
where  the  talk  has  been  rarely  free  and  intimate 
for  him,  and  says,  "  I  have  never  really  talked  with 
anybody  six  times  in  my  life."  So  the  sunshine 
creeps  into  the  journal,  as  it  crept  into  the  cold 
rooms  of  the  Palazzo  Larazani ;  and  it  is  only  when 
the  miracle  has  been  accomplished  that  Hawthorne 
begins  to  suspect  the  truth,  that  he  is  the  last  and 
one  of  the  most  passionate  lovers  of  the  old  en 
chantress,  Rome.  One  day  he  goes  to  Story's  studio 


THE  WAYSIDE  89 

aud  finds  him  "  at  work  on  a  sitting  statue  of  Cleo 
patra  now  only  fourteen  days  advanced  in  the  clay, 
a  grand  subject,  and  he  is  conceiving  it  with  depth 
and  power,  and  working  it  out  with  adequate 
skill." 

There  are  many  references  to  the  Cleopatra  in 
the  journal,  but  it  is  most  fully  described  in  "  The 
Marble  Faun,"  that  chapter  when  Miriam  goes 
to  Kenyon's  studio.  " '  What  a  woman  is  this  !  ' 
Miriam  exclaimed,  after  a  long  pause.  '  Tell  me, 
did  she  ever  try,  even  while  you  were  creating  her, 
to  overcome  you  with  her  fury  or  with  her  love  ? 
Were  you  not  afraid  to  touch  her  as  she  grew  more 
and  more  towards  hot  life  beneath  your  hand  ? 
My  dear  friend,  it  is  a  great  work !  How  have  you 
learned  to  do  it  ?  ' 

" 4  It  is  the  concentration  of  a  good  deal  of  thought 
and  emotion,  and  toil  of  brain  and  hand,'  said 
Kenyon,  not  without  a  perception  that  his  work 
was  good.  4  But  I  know  not  how  it  came  about  at 
last.  I  kindled  a  great  fire  in  my  mind,  and  threw 
in  material  —  and  as  Aaron  threw  the  gold  of  the 
Israelites  into  the  furnace  —  and  in  the  midmost 
heat  up  rose  Cleopatra  as  you  see  her  ! ' ' 

The  thing  that  Hawthorne  felt  in  Story's  work, 
and  by  which  he  was  profoundly  moved,  was  really 
there,  —  the  quest  of  the  ideal.  In  the  large  build 
ing  Story  erected  in  the  Macao,  where  his  son, 
Waldo,  now  has  a  large  and  prosperous  studio,  one 


90  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

wing  or  gallery  is  still  sacred  to  the  statues  of  the 
elder  Story.  There  they  stand,  rows  and  rows  of 
marble  men  and  women.  You  can  find  the  very 
statues  that  Robert  Browning  admired  so  intensely 
that,  as  judge  of  the  sculpture  at  the  first  world's 
fair,  held  at  the  Crystal  Palace  in  the  year  1854, 
he  awarded  to  Story,  not  only  the  first,  but  the 
second  medal  for  sculpture.  From  that  time  Story's 
success  in  England  was  established.  Lingering 
among  these  statues,  it  is  not  difficult  to  realize 
what  it  was  in  them  that  so  impressed  not  only 
Browning,  but  Hawthorne,  Motley,  Lowell,  Sumner, 
and  other  strong  men  of  that  generation  as  well,  — 
it  was  their  ideality. 

To-day  the  pendulum  of  taste  has  swung  far  in 
the  other  direction.  Technique  is  the  god  the  con 
noisseurs  set  up,  and  accordingly  the  technicians 
are  to  the  fore,  their  names  are  in  every  mouth ; 
but  there  are  already  symptoms  of  a  change.  In 
the  future  we  must  look  for  both  the  ideal  of  beauty 
and  the  technical  skill  to  produce  it.  It  is  only 
when  that  union  takes  place  that  we  have  the  great 
moments  of  art,  and  the  things  are  produced  which 
mankind  cannot  afford  to  lose.  "  One  accent  of  the 
Holy  Ghost  the  heedless  world  hath  never  lost." 
Hawthorne  always  had  a  deep  sympathy  for  pio 
neers.  No  nobler  picture  of  them  survives  than  the 
description  in  the  Main  Street  of  the  early  settlers 
of  Salem.  In  Rome  he  found  a  group  of  pioneers 


THE  WAYSIDE  91 

of  art,  and  his  imagination  responded  to  the  ideal 
that  had  brought  them  across  the  seas. 

If  to-day  we  have  the  beginnings  of  an  American 
school  of  art,  we  have  to  thank  these  pioneer  artists 
for  it.  At  a  time  when  questions  of  expediency  ab 
sorbed  the  public  mind  and  conscience,  a  few  men 
who  believed  in  the  high  mission  of  art  devoted 
themselves  to  it.  In  many  cases  it  seemed  to  the 
friends  at  home  nothing  short  of  madness  for  the 
young  neophyte  to  turn  his  back  upon  the  bread 
and  butter  of  business  that  lay  ready  to  his  hand, 
and  depart  on  a  wild-goose  chase  after  the  golden 
honey  of  art.  Rome  was  at  that  time  the  Mecca  of 
the  American  artists  ;  and  when  Hawthorne  arrived 
there  they  had  already  overcome  the  first  difficulties 
of  the  pioneers,  and  formed  a  compact  and  delight 
ful  group,  from  whose  interesting  lives  Hawthorne 
was  to  find  the  material  for  his  great  romance. 
I  spent  an  hour,  the  other  day,  among  the  works  of 
some  of  those  pioneer  artists  in  the  entrance  hall 
of  the  Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art,  in  New  York, 
where  a  collection  of  the  works  of  the  early  Ameri 
can  sculptors  has  been  arranged.  Some  of  the 
statues,  and  nearly  all  of  the  sculptors  who  made 
them,  are  mentioned  by  Hawthorne.  While  we 
cannot  feel  as  he  and  some  of  his  contemporaries 
felt  about  our  pioneers,  —  they  freely  compared 
their  work  to  the  masterpieces  of  Greek  sculp 
ture,  often  to  the  detriment  of  the  Greeks,  —  it  is 


92  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

impossible  to  look  at  the  marbles  of  an  outworn 
taste  without  a  certain  emotional  understanding  — 
if  for  no  other  reason,  on  account  of  all  they  stood 
for  to  the  older  generation. 

On  the  24th  of  May  the  Hawthornes  left  Rome 
and  started  on  their  memorable  drive  to  Florence. 
People  nowadays  make  the  trip  by  train  and  give 
six  hours  to  it.  The  Hawthornes  drove  over  the 
fine  route,  giving  ten  days  to  the  journey,  which 
cost  them  one  hundred  dollars,  food  and  lodging 
included.  Hawthorne  notes  in  his  journal  something 
of  his  feelings  on  driving  out  through  the  Porta 
del  Popolo  and  along  the  Via  Flammiuia,  after  his 
four  months'  stay  in  Rome.  "  I  begin  to  find,"  he 
says,  "  that  I  have  a  strange  affection  for  it.  It  is 
very  singular,  the  sad  embrace  with  which  Rome 
takes  possession  of  your  soul."  They  stopped  at 
the  chief  points  of  interest  on  the  way,  all  of  which 
are  described  with  more  of  humor  and  affection 
and  less  of  conscience  and  labor  than  in  the  first 
weary  notes  made  in  Rome,  where  we  feel  fatigue 
and  impatience  in  the  accounts  of  the  sights  so  con 
scientiously  studied.  They  see  Perugia  and  Assisi, 
Foligno  and  Spoleto.  The  visit  to  Arezzo,  where 
they  saw  the  house  of  Petrarch,  was  one  of  the  most 
enjoyable. 

"  Right  opposite  Petrarch's  birth-house,"  Haw 
thorne  says,  —  "  and  it  must  have  been  the  well 
whence  the  water  was  drawn  that  first  bathed  him,  — 


THE  WAYSIDE  93 

is  a  well  that  Boccaccio  has  introduced  into  one  of 
his  stories.  This  well  whence  Petrarch  had  drunk, 
around  which  he  had  played  in  his  boyhood,  and 
which  Boccaccio  has  made  famous,  really  interested 
me  more  than  the  cathedral.  As  I  lingered  round  it,  I 
thought  of  my  own  town  pump  in  Salem,  and  won 
dered  whether  my  townspeople  would  ever  point  it 
out  to  strangers,  and  whether  the  stranger  would 
gaze  on  it  with  any  degree  of  such  interest  as  I  felt 
in  Boccaccio's  well.  Oh,  certainly  not,  but  yet  I  made 
that  town  pump  the  most  celebrated  structure  in 
the  good  town.  A  thousand  and  a  thousand  people 
had  pumped  there  merely  to  water  oxen,  or  fill  their 
tea-kettles  ;  but  when  once  I  grasped  the  handle,  a 
rill  gushed  forth  that  meandered  as  far  as  England, 
as  far  as  India,  besides  tasting  pleasantly  in  every 
town  and  village  of  our  own  country.  I  like  to 
think  of  this  so  long  after  I  did  it,  and  so  far  from 
home,  and  am  not  without  hope  of  some  kindly 
local  remembrance  on  that  score." 

On  arriving  at  Florence,  he  writes,  "  This  jour 
ney  from  Home  has  been  one  of  the  brightest  and 
most  uncareful  interludes  of  my  life.  We  have  all 
enjoyed  it  exceedingly,  and  I  am  happy  that  our 
children  have  it  to  look  back  upon." 

June  and  July  were  passed  at  the  Casa  del  Bello 
in  Florence.  It  seems  to  have  been  a  time  of  great 
pleasure.  They  worked  hard  at  sight-seeing,  and 
for  diversion  consorted  with  the  English  and  Ameri- 


94  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

cans  then  settled  in  Florence.  Hiram  Powers,  the 
sculptor,  takes  the  place  of  William  Story,  and  we 
find  many  records  of  conversations  with  him.  Haw 
thorne  fell  in  love  with  the  Venus  di  Medici  at  first 
sight,  as  he  would  not  have  done  if  he  had  not  had 
those  four  months  in  Rome.  Having  fallen  in  love, 
he  naturally  proceeds  to  fall  out  with  the  lady,  alter 
nately  praising  and  blaming  her ;  there  are  charm 
ing  little  reconciliations  between  them  all  through 
the  Florentine  journals.  On  the  8th  of  June,  as 
"  we  were  at  dinner,  our  servant  brought  in  a  card. 
It  was  Mr.  Robert  Browning's;  he  came  in  and 
shook  hands  with  all  of  us.  He  was  very  vivacious 
and  agreeable ;  he  looked  younger  and  handsomer 
than  when  I  saw  him  in  London.  He  talked  a 
wonderful  quantity  in  a  little  time ;  he  must  be  an 
exceedingly  likable  man.  They  are  to  leave  Flor 
ence  very  soon  and  are  going  to  Normandy,  I  think 
he  said,  for  the  rest  of  the  summer.  —  The  Venus 
di  Medici  has  a  dimple  in  her  chin  !  " 

Browning's  visit  was  returned  next  day.  They  had 
some  difficulty  in  finding  the  Casa  Guidi,  but  the 
visit  was  worth  all  the  trouble.  Mrs.  Browning  met 
them  at  the  door  of  the  drawing-room  —  "a  pale, 
small  person,  scarcely  embodied  at  all.  She  is  a 
good,  kind  fairy,  and  sweetly  disposed  towards  the 
human  race,  although  only  remotely  akin  to  it.  It 
is  wonderful  to  see  how  small  she  is,  how  pale  her 
cheek,  how  bright  and  dark  her  eyes.  There  is  not 


THE  WAYSIDE  05 

such  another  figure  in  the  world.  Mr.  Browning 
seemed  to  be  in  all  parts  of  the  room,  and  in  every 
group  at  the  same  moment ;  a  most  vivid  and  quick- 
thoughted  person,  logical  and  common  sensible,  as 
I  presume  poets  generally  are  in  their  daily  talk. 
We  had  some  tea  and  strawberries,  and  passed  a 
very  pleasant  evening." 

On  the  2d  of  August  the  Hawthornes  moved  to 
the  Villa  Montauto,  the  original  of  the  home  of 
Donatello  at  Monte  Beni.  Here  they  stayed  for 
exactly  two  months,  and  here  was  woven  the  second 
background  of  "  The  Marble  Faun."  The  notes  are 
so  fascinating  at  this  point  that  I  do  not  dare  to 
begin  to  quote  from  them  lest  I  should  never  stop. 
They  remind  me  of  the  experience  I  once  had  in 
a  manufactory  of  tapestries,  standing  beside  the 
weaver  who  sits  behind  the  tapestry,  with  the  pat 
tern  of  his  work  before  him,  weaving  from  behind. 
All  that  we  saw  was  a  rich  medley  of  color,  with 
the  shapes  of  men  and  animals  vaguely  looming 
through,  just  such  an  atmosphere  of  "  golden 
gloom "  as  Motley  says  pervades  "  The  Marble 
Faun."  Every  now  and  again  the  weaver  stepped 
to  the  front  of  his  tapestry  to  observe  the  effect  he 
was  producing,  and  then  returned  to  his  high  stool 
and  worked  on  at  his  rich  umbrage  of  color.  The 
description  of  Una's  chamber  in  the  tower,  to  the 
very  "undraped  little  boy  in  wax,  very  prettily 
modeled  and  holding  up  a  heart  that  looks  like  a  bit 


96  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

of  red  ceiling-wax,"  foreshadows  Donatello's  room, 
already  a-building !  In  the  oratory  connected  with 
Una's  chamber  he  finds  a  skull  the  size  of  life  or 
death,  a  wonderful  piece  of  modeling  —  the  very 
skull  which  Kenyon  finds  in  Donatello's  bedroom. 

There  is  no  greater  pleasure  for  those  who  love 
Hawthorne  than  to  linger  with  him  during  those 
two  happy  months  of  villeggiatura  in  Monte  Beni. 
At  last  he  has  found  Arcadia,  the  country  where 
he  is  most  happily  at  home,  the  country  through 
which  his  kind  hand  has  led  —  still  leads  —  whole 
generations  of  children.  You  can  still  find  Arcadia 
in  rural  Italy,  if  you  have  the  heart  to  look  for 
it,  the  eyes  to  see  it.  Only  step  out  of  the  beaten 
track,  forget  about  germs  and  microbes,  and  you 
will  find  the  land  of  Theocritus,  you  will  find  the 
golden  age  of  Magna  Grecia. 

Hawthorne  learns  to  like  figs — fancy  that  being 
necessary,  but  we  must  remember  that  he  was  fifty- 
four  years  old  when  he  went  to  Italy.  He  finds 
something  in  the  golden  juice  of  the  Tuscan  grapes 
that  is  not  in  the  harsher  juice  of  the  New  Eng 
land  apple,  as  he  at  first  inclines  to  think.  His 
description  of  Sunshine,  the  wine  of  Monte  Beni 
vineyards,  wipes  out  the  offense  of  the  many  slurs 
he  casts  on  the  Italian  vintages.  And  all  the  time 
there  is  growing  in  his  mind  the  character  of  Dona- 
tello.  Only  his  own  words-  can  express  the  process 
that  went  on  in  Hawthorne's  brain  during  those 


THE  WAYSIDE  97 

weeks  at  Bellosquardo.  "  I  kindled  a  great  fire 
within  my  mind,  and  in  the  midmost  heat  up  rose 
Donatello,"  he  might  have  said. 

The  Hawthornes  left  their  villa  on  the  2d  of 
October,  took  the  train  for  Siena,  where  they  re 
mained  for  a  fortnight.  Writing  of  their  depar 
ture  Hawthorne  says :  "  Yesterday  morning  at  six 
o'clock  we  left  our  ancient  tower  and  threw  a  part 
ing  glance,  and  a  rather  sad  one,  over  the  misty 
Val  d'  Arno.  This  summer  will  look  like  a  happy 
one  to  our  children's  retrospect,  and  in  truth  I  have 
found  it  a  peaceful  and  not  uncheerful  one."  From 
Siena  they  drove  to  Rome,  stopping  at  Viterbo, 
one  of  the  most  enchanting  of  the  towns  of  central 
Italy.  They  reached  Rome  on  the  17th  of  October. 
"  I  had,"  says  Hawthorne,  "  a  quiet,  gentle,  com- 
fortable  pleasure,  as  if  after  my  wanderings  I  was 
drawing  near  home ;  for  now  that  I  have  known  it, 
Rome  certainly  does  draw  unto  itself  my  heart,  as 
I  think  even  London,  or  even  little  Concord  itself, 
or  sleepy  old  Salem  never  did  and  never  will." 

The  Hawthornes'  second  Roman  winter  opened 
brilliantly.  Mr.  Thompson  had  found  them  a  com 
fortable  apartment  in  the  Piazza  Poli,  "  with  seven 
rooms  and  a  stair  carpet,  a  civilized  comfort  the 
proudest  palace  of  the  Eternal  City  cannot  boast. 
Narrowness  indoors  strikes  rather  ludicrously,  but 
not  unpleasantly,  after  being  accustomed  to  the 
wastes  and  deserts  of  the  Montauto  villa.  It  is  well 


98  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

to  put  us  in  training  for  the  over  snugness  of  our 
cottage  in  Concord."  The  day  of  their  arrival 
Hawthorne  walks  with  Eosebud  in  the  Medici  Gar 
dens.  They  go  to  the  Pincio,  and  look  over  into  the 
Borghese  grounds,  "  which  methought  were  more 
beautiful  than  ever.  The  same  was  true  of  the  sky, 
and  of  every  object  beneath  it,  and  as  we  came 
homeward  along  the  Corso  I  wondered  at  the 
stateliness  and  palatial  magnificence  of  that  noble 
street.  Once  I  remember  I  thought  it  narrow  and 
far  unworthy  of  its  fame." 

On  the  2d  of  November,  Hawthorne  notes  the 
beginning  of  Una's  dreadful  illness.  During  the 
four  months  of  anguish  and  anxiety  that  followed 
he  makes  no  record,  but  we  know  from  his  son 
Julian  what  Hawthorne  suffered.  From  the  first 
he  took  the  dark  point  of  view  that  his  adored 
daughter  would  not  recover. 

The  27th  of  February,  1859,  he  takes  up  his 
journal  again.  The  next  three  months  in  some  de 
gree  made  up  for  the  dreadful  suffering  of  the  win 
ter.  Hawthorne  enjoyed  many  things,  among  others 
the  carnival,  which  fell  late  that  season.  On  the 
8th  of  March  they  went  to  Mr.  Motley's  balcony 
on  the  Corso.  We  find  notes  which  served  for  the 
carnival  scenes  in  "  The  Marble  Faun."  At  the  end 
of  May,  Una  being  sufficiently  recovered  to  make 
the  journey,  the  Hawthornes  left  Rome  for  Civita 
Vecchia,  where  they  took  ship  for  Marseilles. 


THE  WAYSIDE  99 

Of  their  last  day  in  Kome  Hawthorne  says,  "  I 
walked  to  the  Pincian,  and  saw  the  garden  and  the 
city,  the  Borghese  grounds,  and  St.  Peter's,  in  an 
earlier  sunlight  than  ever  before.  Methought  they 
never  looked  so  beautiful,  nor  the  sky  so  bright  and 
blue.  I  saw  Soracte  on  the  horizon,  and  I  looked 
at  everything  for  the  last  time  ;  nor  do  I  wish  ever 
to  see  any  of  these  objects  again,  though  no  place 
ever  took  so  strong  a  hold  of  my  being  as  Rome, 
nor  ever  seemed  so  close  to  me  or  so  strangely 
familiar.  I  seem  to  know  it  better  than  my  birth 
place,  and  to  have  known  it  longer ;  and  though  I 
have  been  very  miserable  here,  and  languid  with 
the  effects  of  the  atmosphere,  and  disgusted  with 
a  thousand  things  in  daily  life,  still  I  cannot 
say  I  hate  it,  —  perhaps,  might  fairly  own  a  love 
for  it." 

Writing  from  Florence  to  a  friend,  Hawthorne 
says,  "  I  find  this  Italian  air  not  favorable  to  the 
close  toil  of  composition,  although  it  is  very  good 
air  to  dream  in.  I  must  breathe  the  fogs  of  old 
England,  or  the  east  wind  of  Massachusetts,  in 
order  to  put  me  in  working  trim." 

Mr.  Lathrop  speaks  of  "The  Marble  Faun" 
being  not  beyond  the  stage  of  an  elaborate  sketch 
when  Hawthorne  sought  the  fogs  of  old  England. 
At  Redcar  in  Yorkshire,  in  four  months  of  close  toil, 
he  embodied  the  dreams  and  the  experiences  of  those 
sixteen  months  in  Italy.  Then  came  "  The  Marble 


100  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

Faun."  Miriam,  Hilda,  Kenyon  himself  are  indeed 
all  more  or  less  part  of  the  place,  but  above  all 
others  Donatello  haunts  the  memory,  even  as  he 
haunted  the  mind  of  the  magician  who  summoned 
him  from  the  mists  of  the  arcadian  age.  The  inter 
est  in  "  The  Marble  Faun  "  is  twofold,  because  here 
more  than  in  any  of  his  other  romances  we  see  the 
man  Hawthorne  as  well  as  the  artist.  It  is  as  if  he 
lost  something  of  his  native  reserve  in  his  distance 
from  the  home  and  friends  of  his  youth,  and  was 
more  frank  and  free  in  telling  us  directly  his  own 
impressions.  Every  English  reading  person  who 
visits  Rome  reads  "  The  Marble  Faun."  The  poor 
little  library  of  the  Piazza  di  Spagna  is  rich  in 
copies  of  the  Romance  of  Monte  Beni,  and  yet  it 
is  not  easy  to  get  one  of  them  during  the  tourist 
season,  for  they  are  always  "  out."  In  this  novel 
Hawthorne  alternately  rails  against  Rome,  and 
praises  her  with  his  imperishable  words.  Certain 
of  his  phrases  have  become  almost  by-words  as 
applied  to  different  parts  of  the  city.  To  read  "  The 
Marble  Faun  "  to-day,  or  even  to  re-read  it  after 
many  years,  reminds  one  of  the  lady  who,  on  seeing 
"Hamlet"  for  the  first  time,  said  that  "the  thing 
that  struck  her  most  was  the  number  of  quotations 
in  the  play."  Hawthorne  has  stamped  his  own 
personality  ineffaceably  upon  Rome.  Every  writer 
who  has  since  described  Rome  has  consciously  or 
unconsciously  plagiarized  from  the  rich  mine  of 


THE   WAYSIDE  101 

his  incomparable  romance!  In  talking  t>r' writing 
about  Rome,  we  all  use  phrases  stamped  with  the 
Hawthorne  hall-mark.  Just  as  we  quote  the  Bible, 
Shakespeare,  and  Emerson  every  day  without  know 
ing  it,  when  we  speak  or  write  of  Rome  we  talk 
Hawthorne ! 

Mr.  Lathrop  tells  us  that  "  The  Marble  Faun," 
as  Hawthorne  preferred  to  call  the  many-titled 
novel,  was  in  the  opinion  of  its  author  his  best  ro 
mance.  I  am  among  those  who  do  not  agree  with 
him.  As  a  work  of  art  I  do  not  find  the  book  the 
equal  of  "  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,"  "  The 
Blithedale  Romance,"  or  "The  Scarlet  Letter," 
but  as  a  human  document  it  is  of  far  greater  inter 
est  to  the  lover  of  Hawthorne  than  anything  that 
went  before.  The  very  things  he  did  not  know, 
the  very  limitations  of  character  and  knowledge 
it  betrays,  make  it  infinitely  intimate  and  fascinat 
ing.  Nothing  is  more  interesting  in  "  The  Marble 
Faun  "  than  the  struggle  that  goes  on  between  the 
artist  and  the  Puritan,  as  Hawthorne  comes  up 
against  the  mighty  fact  of  the  Church  of  Rome. 
He  is  outraged  at  the  same  time  that  he  is  fasci 
nated  by  it.  The  Puritan  is  outraged,  the  artist  is 
touched.  Again,  in  the  matter  of  art  the  Puritan 
overcomes  the  artist,  and  Hawthorne  is  chiefly 
troubled  by  the  nude  figures  painted  or  sculp 
tured,  that  he  sees  in  church  or  gallery  —  until  the 
Venus  of  Medici  overcomes  him  with  her  dimple ! 


102         c    t. HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

Hawthorne- chastises  the  Italian  with  one  hand  and 
crowns  him  with  the  other,  but  it  is  the  right  hand 
that  lays  the  crown  upon  the  head  of  Donatello, 
and  makes  him  for  us  the  type  of  his  race,  a  soul 
awakened  to  responsibility  and  to  manhood.  At 
that  time  the  cause  of  Italian  Unity  seemed  to  the 
outsiders  who  stood  nearest  to  her  a  lost  cause. 
But  all  the  time  the  great  scheme  was  slowly  ripen 
ing,  and  England,  the  mighty  ally,  the  silent  friend, 
was  working  as  perhaps  no  country  has  ever  worked 
for  the  liberation  of  another:  so  silently,  indeed,  that 
the  golden  peace  of  Rome  seemed  to  Hawthorne 
unlikely  to  be  ever  broken.  He  likes  the  merry 
French  soldiers,  with  their  bugles  and  their  loose 
red  trousers,  and  is  rather  grateful  to  them  than 
otherwise  "  for  serving  as  an  efficient  police,  mak 
ing  Rome  as  safe  as  London,  whereas  without  them 
it  would  very  likely  be  a  den  of  banditti."  There 
he  was  wrong,  for  during  the  brief  and  glorious 
year  of  the  Roman  Republic,  when  Mazzini  was 
Dictator,  and  my  old  friend  and  master,  Michaele 
Costa,  the  painter,  was  one  of  the  three  of  the 
provincial  government,  Rome  was  quite  as  peaceful 
and  orderly  as  it  ever  was  before  or  since.  The 
Romans  are  not  a  turbulent  people ;  whatever  out 
breaks  and  emeutes  take  place  in  Italy  are  in 
Milan  to  the  northward,  where  the  hot  blood  of 
the  Longbeards  still  lends  itself  to  strife  and  re 
bellion. 


THE  WAYSIDE  103 

Hawthorne  took  the  presence  of  the  French  sol 
diers  at  Rome  very  simply,  and  has  only  good  things 
to  say  of  Louis  Napoleon.  He  alternately  praises 
and  denounces  the  Church  of  Rome,  as  he  is  struck 
either  by  its  good  or  its  bad  features,  but  nowhere 
does  he  suggest  that  the  government  of  the  Church 
may  at  some  day  be  supplanted.  He  accepts  things 
as  he  finds  them,  as  the  purely  artistic  nature  usu 
ally  does,  a  fine  love  of  order  inducing  a  dislike 
of  any  violent  change  or  overturning  of  things  es 
tablished.  He  knew  the  Brownings,  he  must  have 
read  their  poems,  he  could  not  have  been  uncon 
scious  of  the  passion  of  patriotism  that  burned  in 
the  breast  of  the  Italian  patriots,  and  of  those 
who  prayed  and  waited  with  them.  Mrs.  Brown 
ing's  death,  a  few  months  after  Hawthorne  saw 
her  in  Florence,  was  hastened  by  her  despair  on 
hearing  of  an  Italian  defeat  which  at  the  time 
seemed  irreparable.  Browning's  Italian  in  Eng 
land  says, 

"  So,  with  a  sullen  '  All 's  for  best,' 
The  land  seems  settling  to  its  rest." 

Beneath  this  apparent  calm  smouldered  the  hid 
den  fire  of  revolution.  If  Hawthorne  was  conscious 
of  this,  he  does  not  mention  it.  But  all  the  time  in 
his  mind  the  idea  was  mellowing  which  best  typifies 
the  awakening  of  the  Italian  nation  to  a  sense  of 
responsibility. 

Donatello,  the  light-hearted,  irresponsible,  faun- 


104  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

like  creature,  through  suffering  and  sin  is  lifted  to 
a  higher  humanity,  is  perfected  by  pain  and  suffer 
ing,  till  in  the  end  he  takes  his  place  with  thinking, 


MKS.  HOWE  :  Mr.  Julian  Hawthorne,  unable  to 
be  present,  has  sent  a  paper,  which,  although  it  is 
to  be  published  elsewhere,  is  an  appropriate  tribute 
to  this  Concord  celebration,  as  it  concerns  his  fa 
ther's  last  years  at  The  Wayside.  The  paper  will 
now  be  read  by  Miss  Margaret  Lothrop. 

[In  a  letter  written  by  Mr.  Julian  Hawthorne 
under  date  of  July  27,  1904,  to  Mrs.  Lothrop,  he 
says : 

"I  am  sorry  not  to  have  been  present,  during 
the  recent  ceremonies,  in  the  beautiful  old  town 
where  I  passed  several  very  happy  and,  to  me, 
memorable  years.  Though  my  father  was  not  born 
there,  the  period  of  his  life  which  he  always  best 
loved  to  look  back  upon  was  spent  there ;  there  he 
built  his  home,  and  there  he  was  buried.  In  the 
subjoined  paper  I  have  given  an  outline  of  the 
concluding  circumstances  of  his  life,  as  they  remain 
in  my  recollection ;  and  I  am  glad  that  this  little 
record  should  be  associated  with  the  valuable  and 
thoughtful  words  with  which  his  friends  and  lovers 
honored  the  anniversary  of  his  birth."] 


THE   WAYSIDE  105 

HAWTHORNE'S  LAST  TEAKS 

BY  JULIAN   HAWTHORNE 

From  green,  showery  England  and  the  cool  Atlan 
tic,  my  father  returned  to  Concord  to  find  it  parch 
ing  under  the  unmitigated  heat  of  the  New  Eng 
land  summer.  A  few  friends  met  him  at  the  dock, 
but  he  took  the  afternoon  train  out  of  Boston  and 
reached  The  Wayside  before  supper  time.  Little 
Benjie,  the  youngest  son  of  Uncle  Horace  Mann, 
attended  us  on  our  way  from  the  railway  station, 
and  entertained  us  by  his  Yankee  "  guessing  "  and 
smart  ways.  And  my  father,  who  during  the  voy 
age  had  cast  many  a  thoughtful  glance  back  to 
ward  the  east,  now  beheld  the  buff-colored  old 
dwelling  in  which  he  was  to  pass  the  four  closing 
years  of  his  life.  No  doubt  he  may  have  said  to 
himself  that  there  were  villas  in  Italy,  and  country- 
seats  in  England,  which  would  better  have  suited 
him.  Doubtless,  too,  but  for  his  children's  sake, 
he  would  have  settled  somewhere  in  Europe ;  he 
had  lived  in  Europe  so  long,  and  it  had  become 
endeared  to  him  by  so  many  associations,  sad  as 
well  as  pleasant,  and  the  quiet  and  old-fashioned 
ways  there  so  well  suited  his  age  and  temperament, 
that  he  could  no  longer  feel  anything  homelike  in 
America.  Yet  he  was  patriotic,  and  loved  his  coun 
try.  The  truth  may  have  been,  that  he  could  have 


106  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

been  content  neither  in  the  Old  World  nor  in  the 
New ;  whichever  he  had  chosen,  he  would  have  re 
gretted  the  other.  Be  that  as  it  may,  it  was  Amer 
ica  that  lie  chose ;  he  wished  his  son  to  go  to  an 
American  college,  and  his  daughters  to  grow  up 
under  American  conditions.  There  are  indications 
that  he  may  have  entertained  a  hope  that,  after 
some  years,  circumstances  would  permit  him  to 
revisit  the  Old  Home.  But,  if  so,  the  hope  was 
soon  abandoned.  Meanwhile  he  maintained  a 
cheerful  demeanor,  and  contemplated  The  Wayside 
with  a  humorous  expression,  half  pleased,  half 
rueful.  He  was  still  boy  enough  to  feel  something 
of  those  pleasurable  thrills  which  shook  the  hearts 
of  his  children  at  their  home-coming.  Perhaps  he 
would  find  it  possible  to  take  up  the  old  life  with 
fresh  zest,  and  to  do  work  which  should  have  in  it 
the  spirit  of  the  western  continent,  enriched  and 
deepened  by  his  experience  of  the  East.  America 
was  the  nobler  choice. 

Concord,  in  those  days,  was  after  all  a  homely 
old  place,  and  the  folks  were  hospitable.  Here  were 
the  cordial  Manns,  and  Aunt  Lizzie  Peabody,  and 
Mr.  Bull,  the  grape-grower,  and  the  benign  light  of 
Emerson's  countenance,  and  white-locked,  orphic 
Mr.  Alcott,  blinking  as  though  dazzled  by  the  light 
of  his  own  inspiration  ;  and  hook-nosed,  bearded, 
stealthy  Thoreau,  and  Ellery  Channing,  stalking  in, 
downcast  and  elusive,  but  with  a  substantial  man 


*  THE   WAYSIDE  107 

inside,  could  you  but  catch  him  ;  and  Judge  Eben- 
ezer  Rockwood  Hoar,  with  his  lovely,  spiritual 
sister ;  and  other  kindly  people.  There  was  none 
of  the  storied  richness  and  automatic  method  of 
English  society,  which  takes  the  individual  into  its 
comfortable  current,  and  sweeps  him  along  through 
agreeable  eddies  and  leisurely  stretches  with  the 
least  possible  exertion  on  his  own  part;  yet  it  was 
in  its  way  the  best  of  society,  intelligent,  simple, 
natural,  self-respecting,  and  quietly  independent. 
Its  members  knew  how  to  be  social,  and  also  how 
to  let  one  another  alone.  They  were  mutually  help 
ful,  but  not  intrusive.  If  they  happened  to  know 
that  Concord  was  the  best  place  in  the  world,  they 
did  not  think  it  necessary  to  proclaim  the  fact  in 
and  out  of  season.  There  stood  the  stout  little 
town ;  let  it  speak  for  itself.  Down  by  the  river, 
where  had  stood  the  rude  bridge  that  arched  the 
flood,  was  a  little  gray  stone  obelisk,  marking  the 
spot  where  the  British  soldiers  fell  with  the  sound 
of  the  shot  that  was  heard  round  the  world  ringing 
in  their  dying  ears.  A  mile  away  was  the  four 
square  white  wooden  home  of  Emerson,  toward 
which  were  turned  the  trusting  eyes  of  all  emanci 
pated  optimists  the  world  over,  though  his  fellow 
townsmen  knew  him  to  be,  really,  simply  a  good 
neighbor  and  useful  citizen,  who  had  as  much  to 
thank  Concord  for  as  Concord  him,  and  whose 
transcendental  vagaries  they  regarded  with  kindly 


108  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

indulgence.  Thoreau  had  his  amiable  foibles  too ; 
and  Concord  had  fought  it  out  with  him,  and 
overcome  him,  in  the  matter  of  tax-paying ;  but 
he  could  bear  witness  that  in  Concord  grew  all 
the  flowers  and  sang  all  the  birds  worth  men 
tioning  in  the  world,  and  he  could  cause  Indian 
arrow-heads  to  sprout  out  of  the  earth  merely  by 
casting  his  eyes  downward.  Judge  Hoar,  again, 
was  the  best  judge  in  New  England,  and  his  ven 
erable  father,  who  was  still  living  (a  memorable 
figure,  gentlemanly,  mild,  slender,  with  a  rusty 
black  body-coat  and  high  stock,  and  a  tall,  dusty 
stove-pipe  hat  set  on  his  pale,  serene  brows),  would 
have  been  better  than  he,  had  he  not  already  lived 
his  active  life  in  a  former  generation.  Where  in 
the  world  could  you  buy  better  groceries  than  at 
Walcott  and  Holden's,  or  finer  shoes  than  those 
that  Jonas  Hastings  made  in  his  little  back  shop, 
or  a  more  commodious  assortment  of  general  goods 
than  were  to  be  found  in  Mr.  Stacy's  store  (indeed, 
he  was  afterward  appointed  postmaster,  and  his 
place  became  a  social  club  during  the  two  half 
hours  before  and  after  mail  deliveries).  If  you 
spoke  of  farming,  there  were  Mr.  Moore's  broad 
acres,  with  their  thriving  crops  of  asparagus, 
brought  up  according  to  the  latest  scientific  meth 
ods,  and  rhubarb,  and  corn,  and  tomatoes,  and 
other  vegetables  ;  not  to  speak  of  his  many  pros 
perous  rivals.  In  the  way  of  a  hostelry,  there  was 


THE  WAYSIDE  109 

the  time-honored  Middlesex  Hotel,  with  its  veranda 
and  sheds  and  easy-going  bar-room  ;  and  on  the 
other  side  of  the  village  square  was  the  brick  town 
hall,  where,  every  week  in  the  season,  one  or  other 
of  the  lights  of  the  New  England  lecture  platform 
held  forth  to  attentive  and  appreciative  audiences ; 
or  where  balls  and  receptions  were  given  upon 
occasion,  or  political  meetings  held  as  important 
as  any  in  Faneuil  Hall ;  or  if  you  wanted  medica.1 
treatment,  who  was  better  than  old  Dr.  Bartlett  ? 
—  or  if  a  school,  Master  Sanborn,  over  to  the  west 
yonder,  was  second  to  no  pedagogue  in  the  world 
in  his  ability  to  turn  country  boys  and  girls  into 
accomplished  men  and  women.  It  was  not  neces 
sary  to  draw  attention  to  these  excellences  ;  they 
were  visible  and  undeniable  to  the  most  careless 
eye.  And  it  was  no  wonder,  therefore,  that  Na 
thaniel  Hawthorne,  after  his  tour  of  the  world, 
should  return  at  last  to  old  Concord  as  to  the  most 
desirable  place  on  this  planet  to  live  and  die  in. 

So  my  father,  clad  in  an  old  hat  and  coat  and 
village-made  shoes,  strolled  about  his  estate  and 
meditated  over  Concord  and  the  less  notable  places 
that  he  had  known.  He  did  not  much  affect  Bos 
ton  or  even  local  society.  He  did  not  care  to  take 
a  longer  walk  than  to  Walden  Pond  and  back, 
or  up  the  old  turnpike  along  which  the  British 
had  retreated  a  hundred  years  before  ;  he  confined 
himself  for  the  most  part  to  his  own  fields  and 


110       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

hillside.  The  level  meadow  on  the  south  of  the 
road  was  laid  out  partly  in  young  fruit  trees,  and 
partly  in  corn  and  beans ;  a  straight  path  to  the 
brook  was  made,  and  larches  were  set  out  on  both 
sides  of  it.  A  few  old  apple-trees  grew  to  the  west 
of  the  area  divided  by  the  path ;  and  there  was 
one  Porter  apple-tree  that  stood  close  to  the  fence, 
on  which  early  and  delicious  fruit  appeared  in 
profusion  every  year.  The  house  inclosure  was  pro 
tected  from  the  street  by  a  hedge,  and  by  tall 
spruces ;  there  was  likewise  an  ancient  mulberry- 
tree,  spreading  its  boughs  over  the  tiny  lawn  in 
front  of  the  library  windows,  and  scattering  it, 
in  the  season,  with  its  crimson  and  purple  berries. 
Against  its  low  trunk  a  rustic  seat  was  put  up,  on 
which  my  father  and  mother  often  sat  in  the  after 
noons,  talking  over  their  domestic  and  agricultural 
plans.  On  the  hillside,  terraced  out  years  before 
by  Alcott,  more  apple-trees  grew ;  and  abundant 
laburnums,  their  branches  heavy  with  pendulous 
golden  blossoms;  and  higher  up,  on  the  summit, 
white  pines  and  pitch  pines,  and  a  mingled,  irreg 
ular  array  of  birch,  oak,  elm,  and  hickory,  all  of 
recent  growth ;  a  tangled  little  wood,  with  none 
of  the  grandeur  and  spaciousness  of  the  forests  of 
Walden.  But  there  was  a  pleasant,  quiet  view 
from  the  western  brow  of  the  hill,  and  a  seat  was 
made  there,  in  the  Alcott  style,  of  twisted  boughs ; 
and  eastward  from  it,  along  the  crest  of  the  ac- 


THE  WAYSIDE  111 

clivity,  my  father  was  wont  to  pace  to  and  fro  by 
himself,  mornings  and  afternoons,  until  at  length 
a  footpath  was  worn  into  the  rooty  substance  of 
the  hill,  a  distance  of  some  two  hundred  yards  to 
the  fence  which  inclosed  Mr.  Bull's  estate.  Many 
a  meditative  mile  did  he  pace  there  ;  and  the  track 
formed  by  his  recurrent  footsteps  remained  distinct 
long  after  he  had  passed  farther  on  his  way,  whither 
none  might  overtake  him. 

But  the  family  needed  more  elbow-room  than  in 
the  early  days,  and  it  was  necessary  to  make  The 
Wayside  bigger.  My  father  had  long  contemplated 
these  additions,  and  he  now  called  the  village  car 
penters  into  consultation ;  and  after  much  debate, 
Mr.  Wetherbee  and  Mr.  Watts  submitted  their 
plans.  They  thought  that  the  requisite  enlarge 
ment  could  be  done  for  about  five  hundred  dollars. 
Upon  this  basis  they  set  to  work  and  labored  with 
more  or  less  diligence  for  a  year  or  thereabouts, 
and  the  bill  gradually  and  inevitably  grew  until  at 
the  end  it  amounted  to  thrice  the  sum  originally 
named.  My  father  watched  the  operations  with  his 
hands  folded  behind  him  and  his  soft  felt  hat 
pulled  down  on  his  forehead ;  or  he  ascended  the 
hill,  to  escape  the  hammering  and  sawing ;  but 
during  that  year  there  could  be  no  studious  repose 
for  him  in  which  to  evolve  literary  imaginings. 
A  room  was  added  over  the  library ;  another  in  the 
rear  of  the  dining-room ;  another  above  that,  and 


112  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

above  that  still  one  more,  the  three  constituting  the 
tower,  and  the  top  room  being  my  father's  study. 
Besides  these  a  large  room  was  placed  over  the 
kitchen,  with  its  outlook  on  the  terraces  of  the  hill ; 
it  had  an  arched  roof,  devised  to  please  my  mother ; 
and  the  walls  were  painted  with  a  color  which  the 
painter  described  as  '*  a  kind  of  blue  pink."  Orna 
mental  eaves  and  gables  were  added  here  and  there ; 
in  the  place  of  the  main  entrance,  which  had  been 
under  the  gable  in  the  centre  of  the  house-front, 
a  bow  window  was  devised,  and  the  entrance  was 
put  to  the  west,  and  covered  with  a  pretty  gabled 
porch.  To  me  and  to  my  younger  sister  the  racket, 
the  clutter,  and  the  construction  were  delightful,  a 
continuous  vaudeville  ;  and  my  mother  was  always 
an  interested  and  hopeful  spectator  and  counselor ; 
but  my  father's  bearing  denoted  humorous  resigna 
tion  oftener  than  any  other  emotion.  He  attempted 
no  writing,  but  in  the  evenings,  after  the  uproar 
was  done  for  the  day,  we  would  gather  in  the 
library,  and  he  would  read  aloud  to  us ;  the  greater 
part  of  that  year  was  occupied  with  the  Waverley 
Novels,  taken  up  one  after  another  from  beginning 
to  end  of  the  series.  I  cannot  overestimate  either 
the  enjoyment  or  the  profit  that  I  got  from  those 
readings.  My  sisters  sat  large-eyed  and  rapt ;  my 
mother  sewed  and  listened  with  that  sympathy  and 
apprehension  which  made  her  face  always  beautiful. 
I  doubt  not  that  the  reader,  too,  was  happy  in  these 


HAWTHORNE'S   STUDY  IN  THE   TOWER 


THE  WAYSIDE  113 

evenings.  The  tall  astral  lamp  gave  out  its  soft 
light,  which  glistened  on  the  backs  of  the  books 
in  the  surrounding  bookcases  ;  outdoors  there  was 
peace,  save  for  the  song  of  insects  in  summer,  and 
in  winter  the  cracklings  of  the  frost.  The  two  splen 
did  hours  over,  I  would  go  to  bed,  with  a  heart  and 
mind  full  of  adventure,  chivalry,  and  romance. 

Before  the  building  was  done  another  and  deeper 
kind  of  disturbance  came  to  keep  my  father  from 
his  work.  The  first  great  breakers  of  our  national 
storm  had  been  rolling  in  heavily  upon  the  shore, 
and  the  ills  which  they  foreboded  robbed  him  of 
tranquillity.  It  was  in  vain  that  he  placed  the 
period  of  his  "  Komance  of  Immortality "  a  cen 
tury  ago  ;  the  guns  of  Sumter  and  of  Bull  Eun 
sounded  in  his  ears  none  the  less  distinct  for  the  im 
aginative  remoteness  in  which  he  strove  to  seclude 
himself.  And  then,  unexpectedly,  and  with  what 
seemed  some  abruptness,  his  health  and  strength 
began  to  fail.  He  lost  weight,  his  cheeks  grew  hol 
low,  his  hair  whitened,  his  once  firm  and  elastic 
step  grew  slow  and  uncertain.  He  still  climbed  his 
hill,  though  slowly,  and  paced  to  and  fro  on  its 
summit,  or  sat  for  long  periods  gazing  out  over  the 
meadows,  or  listening  to  the  music  of  the  pines. 
He  would  also  shut  himself  up  in  his  tower  study 
for  hours  each  day,  and  the  manuscripts  he  left 
behind  him  showed  that  he  worked  hard ;  his  gen 
eral  mood  in  quiescence  became  grave,  though  in 


114  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

family  intercourse  he  still  maintained  the  playful 
ness  and  humor  that  had  always  marked  him  in 
my  knowledge.  He  possibly  realized  better  than 
any  of  us  what  his  illness  portended.  "  There  was 
nothing  the  matter  "  with  him  ;  and  that  indefinite- 
ness  of  ailment  was  the  serious  feature.  He  was 
approaching  the  end,  and  was  silently  adjusting 
himself  to  the  prospect  of  death,  while  his  mind 
was  consciously  richer  both  in  the  acquisitions  of 
experience  and  in  the  treasures  of  wisdom  than 
ever  before,  and  when  he  feared  that  the  wife  and 
children  whom  he  loved  would  be  left  inadequately 
provided  for.  My  father  was  a  wise  man,  —  too 
wise  to  delude  himself  into  accepting  as  true  happi 
ness  the  spiritual  self-mutilation  of  the  ascetic  or 
self-denier  ;  happiness,  to  him,  meant  the  full  free 
dom  and  energy  of  every  faculty,  employed  on  a 
stage  unimpeded  by  unfavorable  conditions  either 
public  or  private.  There  had  never  been  and  there 
could  never  be  such  happiness  for  him  in  this 
world.  He  had  deep  and  reverent  religious  faith, 
though  of  what  precise  purport  I  am  unable  to  say. 
But  when  a  man  of  great  soul  finds  himself  face 
to  face  with  the  end  of  all  things  earthly,  he  must 
admit  that  he  knows  nothing,  and  that  the  un 
searchable  ways  of  the  Almighty  may  prove  widely 
divergent  from  those  which  theory  and  hope  have 
forecast.  Dramatic  natures,  fanatics  and  enthusi 
asts,  the  dull  and  the  defiant,  may  meet  death  with 


THE  WAYSIDE  115 

indifference,  or  with  a  smile  or  a  scoff ;  but  a  man 
of  sincerity  so  organic  as  my  father  could  not  resort 
to  these  subterfuges.  He  went  on  his  way,  not  com- 
plainingly  or  grudgingly,  not  fearfully  or  fantas 
tically,  but  with  a  grave  simplicity  that  was  impres 
sive.  In  this,  as  in  all  his  other  manifestations,  he 
showed  courage  and  self-respect  and  a  noble  mod 
esty.  He  had  been  a  happy  man,  as  this  world 
goes ;  yet  when  at  the  close  of  his  career  he  glanced 
back  over  its  former  stages,  he  was  unable,  as  he 
wrote  to  Stoddard,  to  recall  a  moment  when  he 
would  have  commanded  the  fatal  joy-bell  of  King 
Felix  to  be  rung.  Happiness  would  be  a  foolish 
word  did  we  not  believe  that  a  life  is  to  come  in 
which  the  word  will  represent  a  reality  and  not  a 
dream. 

He  took  a  cordial  interest  in  his  son's  college 
experiment ;  and  I  have  always  been  glad  that  he 
did  not  witness  its  somewhat  unstimulating  termi 
nation.  When  anxiety  as  to  his  physical  condition 
increased,  he  submitted  to  expedients  devised  to 
restore  his  vigor ;  he  made  occasional  visits  to  Bos 
ton,  chatting  in  the  old  Corner  Bookstore,  or  din 
ing  with  Fields  and  his  wife,  whose  hospitality  and 
good  humor  refreshed  him.  Later  he  undertook 
little  journeys  away  from  home  ;  to  Washington  and 
the  seat  of  war,  or,  with  his  son,  to  some  near-by 
seaside  place ;  but  he  did  this  to  please  others,  not 
with  the  hope  in  himself  of  any  lasting  benefit. 


116  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

In  the  last  but  one  of  these  trips,  the  sudden  death 
of  Ticknor,  his  companion,  had  a  disastrous  effect 
upon  him.  I  remember  the  description  my  mother 
gave  of  his  dismayed  and  anguished  appearance. 
After  some  weeks  he  was  induced  to  make  another 
trial  of  change  of  scene  with  Franklin  Pierce  ;  and 
I  need  not  recount  the  last  days,  which  are  well 
known.  The  news  came  to  me,  in  Harvard,  in  the 
forenoon  of  the  19th  of  May ;  I  went  to  speak  with 
Professor  Gurney,  who  had  been  my  especial  friend 
and  counselor  in  college,  and  he  said :  "  It  is  only 
a  few  months  since  Thackeray,  one  of  the  best  men 
in  England,  died,  and  now  we  have  lost  by  far  the 
best  man  in  America."  It  was  beautiful  spring 
weather;  but  the  sunlight,  and  the  blue,  and  the 
green  looked  strange,  like  a  phantasmagory  thrown 
upon  the  dark. 

It  was  during  these  last  Concord  years  that  I 
had  begun  to  form  relations  with  my  father  beyond 
the  instinctive,  unreasoning  affection  of  childhood. 
He  had  begun  to  speak  with  me  of  other  than 
childish  things.  He  encouraged  me  to  enter  into 
the  society  of  the  young  folks  in  Concord,  —  the 
dances  and  picnics  and  masqued  balls  and  rowing 
and  bathing  parties ;  he  got  me  good  clothes  to 
wear,  and  quietly  stimulated  my  rather  lagging 
interest  in  the  social  amenities  of  my  companions. 
No  doubt  he  was  contemplating  the  future  of  us  all 
with  some  solicitude.  But  I  think  he  especially  de- 


THE  WAYSIDE  117 

sired  to  steer  me  away  from  the  lonely  experiences 
of  his  own  young  manhood ;  and  as  I  have  said 
before,  he  explicitly  advised  me  against  adopting 
the  literary  calling.  I  can  hardly  infer  that,  modest 
as  was  his  estimate  of  his  own  literary  achieve 
ments,  he  actually  regretted  having  devoted  himself 
to  writing ;  but  it  may  be  that  he  believed  it  would 
have  been  better  for  him  and  his  had  he  more  cul 
tivated  intercourse  with  his  fellow  creatures,  at  the 
age  when  such  intercourse  affects  a  man.  He  did 
not  wish  "  the  cursed  habit  of  solitude  "  to  hamper 
his  descendant.  Not  only  in  this,  but  in  many  other 
ways,  did  his  loving  and  wise  forethought  seek  to 
guard  and  make  easy  the  path  of  his  children  in 
the  world  ;  much  of  this  care  we  did  not  recognize 
till  afterward.  Certainly  there  was  no  duty  of  hus 
band  and  father  that  he  did  not  fulfill,  giving  good 
measure,  pressed  down  and  running  over,  and  yet 
giving  it  so  unobtrusively  and  naturally  as  to  make 
it  appear,  if  possible,  a  mere  matter  of  course  and 
of  routine.  But,  in  truth,  it  was  the  love  that  went 
with  the  gift  that  with  its  lovely  splendor  dazzled 
out  of  sight  all  thought  or  consciousness  of  duty, 
and  made  the  memory  of  the  husband  and  father  a 
more  precious  heritage  and  protector  than  his  own 
wise  counsel  even  could  be.  Forty  years'  contem 
plation  of  what  he  was  has  served  to  render  him 
only  brighter  and  loftier  in  my  memory.  I  have 
known  many  good  men  since  he  died,  and  not  a  few 


118  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

men  of  genius  ;  but  my  father's  figure  still  stands 
high  and  apart.  The  world  regards  him  as  one  of 
the  great  lights  of  American  literature ;  a  handful 
of  surviving  friends  remember  him  as  a  man  dis 
tinguished  in  their  love  and  honor;  but  in  my 
thought  of  him  he  has  a  quality  not  to  be  described ; 
that  is  associated  with  the  early  impressions  which 
make  the  name  of  home  beautiful ;  with  a  child's 
delight  in  the  glory  of  nature ;  with  a  boy's  aspira 
tions  toward  a  pure  and  generous  career ;  with  in 
timate  conceptions  of  truth,  bravery,  and  simplicity. 
He  did  not  speak  much ;  but  his  presence  was  the 
finest  conversation  ;  and  the  few  words  that  he  ut 
tered  came  pointed  with  a  meaning  and  aimed  with 
a  relevance  that  have  held  them  in  my  mind  after 
more  than  half  a  lifetime. 

MRS.  HOWE  then  introduced  Mr.  Moncure  D. 
Conway,  who  gave  the  following  address  on  "  The 
World  set  in  Hawthorne's  Heart." 

ADDRESS   OF  MONCURE   D.   CONWAY 

Fifteen  years  ago,  during  the  centennial  of  Presi 
dent  Washington,  I  met  an  American  historian  who 
exclaimed :  "  Good  God !  how  much  nonsense  has 
been  written  about  that  man !  "  But  now  we  have 
come  to  a  centennial  not  likely  to  elicit  nonsense. 
Confucius  said:  "When  the  fame  of  Hea  Hooi 
is  heard  of,  the  mean  man  becomes  liberal,  and  the 


THE  WAYSIDE  119 

miserly  becomes  generous."  I  have  noticed  that  in 
talking  of  Hawthorne  even  dull  people  often  be 
come  intelligent.  That,  by  the  way,  may  encourage 
you  at  the  present  moment.  Helen  Hunt,  —  many 
years  before  she  began  to  write  under  the  name 
of  H.  H., — being  the  young  wife  of  an  army 
officer,  had  to  entertain  officers  in  her  house,  and 
she  told  me  that  she  found  it  a  good  criterion  of 
what  was  in  them  to  give  each  new  guest  a  story 
of  Hawthorne  to  read  and  find  what  he  thought 
of  it.  "  I  gave  Captain  Blank  k  The  Snow  Image,' 
and  he  thought  it  a  mere  fairy  tale  for  a  child. 
So  I  adapted  my  conversation  to  a  polite  block 
head." 

It  has  sometimes  appeared  to  me  a  pity  that 
Hawthorne  and  Emerson  were  not  both  born  here 
in  Concord.  Some  Frenchman  said  that  Madame 
de  Pompadour  had  but  one  fault,  that  was  —  being 
born.  It  seems  a  little  inconsiderate  in  Hawthorne 
that  he  was  not  born  in  Concord.  However,  as  he 
seems  to  have  regarded  himself  as  not  really  born 
until  he  was  married,  we  may  to-day  think  of  the 
Old  Manse  as  in  a  sense  his  birth-house. 

It  impresses  me  as  a  phenomenal  thing  that  this 
small  town  should  have  contained  at  one  and  the 
same  time  two  men  of  representative  genius.  On 
the  first  day  that  I  ever  set  foot  in  Concord  —  just 
fifty-one  years  ago  —  I  went  first  to  take  a  look  at 
the  Old  Manse.  While  I  was  looking  at  it  from 


120  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

the  road,  Hawthorne,  who  had  been  making  a  call 
there  before  leaving  for  Liverpool,  stepped  out ;  I 
followed,  unobserved,  as  far  as  the  house  of  Emer 
son,  to  meet  whom  I  had  come.  I  was  then  twenty- 
one.  Now,  an  old  man,  I  see  those  houses  as  houses 
of  the  two  Interpreters  in  life's  pilgrimage,  —  In 
terpreters  antipodally  related,  —  as  Oversoul  to 
Worldsoul,  —  poles  of  one  sphere. 

It  was  a  long  pilgrimage,  for  those  brought  up 
in  a  fictitious  religious  universe,  to  the  Emerson 
House ;  and  then  a  long  pilgrimage  to  the  Haw 
thorne  House.  Even  Wentworth  Higginson's  essay 
on  "  Saints  and  their  Bodies,"  with  all  its  wit  and 
wisdom,  could  not  quite  laugh  us  out  of  the  heredi 
tary  notion  that  our  body  is  a  coarse  and  vulgar 
thing  compared  with  the  soul.  You  sometimes  hear 
a  handsome  preacher,  —  robust,  clear-eyed,  dis 
coursing  medieval  and  morbid  dogmas  and  super 
stitions  :  if  that  preacher's  soul  could  only  attain 
the  perfection  of  his  body,  what  a  splendid  sermon 
you  would  hear !  In  that  body  ten  thousand  valves 
are  opening  and  closing  with  perfect  precision ; 
harp-strings  of  the  ear,  lenses  of  the  eye,  exquisite 
network  of  vibrant  nerves,  are  all  fulfilling  their 
functions  of  the  living  hour,  while  the  poor  preach 
er's  soul  is  tossed  about  in  the  deserts  of  unrea 
son,  because  it  is  not  his  own  nor  any  soul,  but 
the  ghost  of  something  transmitted  from  other 
minds. 


THE  WAYSIDE  121 

There  was  an  ancient  wise  man  called  Solomon, 

—  that  is,  the  Man  of  Salem,  or  peace,  —  to  whom 
were  ascribed  the  words :  "  God  hath  made  every 
thing  beautiful  in  its  time;  also  he  hath  set  the 
world  in  (man's)  heart,  so  that  he  cannot  discover 
God's  work  from  first  to  last." 

Those  words — "he  hath  set  the  world  in  man's 
heart,"  given  as  the  reason  for  giving  up  the  prob 
lem  of  the  universe,  —  recurred  to  me  when  reading 
a  letter  of  our  later  Salem  man  to  a  lady  of  Salem, 

—  the  year  before  their  marriage,  concerning  some 
mediumistic  performances.    He  says :  "  If  we  would 
know  what  heaven  is,  before  we  come  thither,  let 
us  retire  into  the  depths  of  our  own  spirits,  and  we 
shall  find  it  there  among  holy  thoughts  and  feel 
ings.  .  .  .  The  view  which  I  take  of  this  matter  is 
caused  by  no  want  of  faith  in   mysteries,  but  by 
a  deep  reverence  of  the  soul,  and  of  the  mysteries 
which  it  knows  within  itself,  but  never  transmits  to 
the  earthly  eye  or  ear.   Keep  the  imagination  sane, 

—  that  is  one  of  the  truest  conditions  of  communion 
with  heaven." 

The  world  set  in  Hawthorne's  heart  was  one  that 
no  worldly  man  can  discover,  nor  even  a  man  of 
the  world.  It  was  known  to  Emerson,  who  said, 
"An  actually  existent  fly  is  more  important  than 
a  possibly  existent  angel."  It  was  known  to  Mar 
garet  Fuller,  who  said :  "  The  stars  tell  all  their 
secrets  to  the  flowers,  and  if  we  only  knew  how  to 


122  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

look  around  us  we  should  not  need  to  look  above." 
No  heavenly  deity  was  ever  more  jealous  than  the 
World-soul.  That  genius  which  would  really  know 
the  world  as  it  is  cannot  mingle  with  its  mire, 
its  vulgarity,  its  commonplace  crowds,  whether  in 
churches  or  in  political  parties ;  it  is  an  "  art  and 
mystery  "  to  be  mastered  in  silence  and  solitude ; 
for  it  is  a  world  in  the  heart,  explored  by  the  most 
delicate  susceptibilities,  tenderest  sympathies,  finest 
intuitions,  but  most  easily  contaminated.  Nor  can 
the  genius  developed  to  interpret  the  world  in  its 
heart  fulfill  that  trust  if  it  is  absorbed  in  thoughts 
of  some  other  world.  Many  of  us  have  passed  some 
of  our  best  years  dreaming  of  a  past  paradise  and 
a  paradise  to  be  regained,  only  to  sympathize  at 
last  with  Alice  in  the  Looking-glass,  who  says  to 
her  hosts,  —  "  Jam  yesterday,  jam  to-morrow,  but 
never  jam  to-day !  " 

As  Hawthorne  felt  the  horror  of  the  witch  ex 
ecutions  in  Salem  as  if  he  had  witnessed  them,  and 
dreaded  a  church,  albeit  not  skeptical,  so  he  could 
not  unite  in  societies  for  reforming  the  world, 
while  not  hostile  to  them,  and  able  to  see  their  pic 
turesque  side.  He  did  not  see  the  roseate  character 
of  the  new  world  aimed  at.  As  Miles  Coverdale  at 
Brook  Farm,  he  has  no  doubt  that  their  dreams 
will  be  realized,  but  there  was  no  ideal  charm  in 
the  dreams.  He  says  :  "  Of  course,  when  the  reality 
comes  it  will  wear  the  every-day,  commonplace, 


THE  WAYSIDE  123 

and  rather  homely  garb  that  reality  always  does 
put  on."  In  "The  Journal  of  an  African  Cruiser," 
edited  by  Hawthorne  in  1845,  he  says :  "  It  is  re 
markable  that  De  Foe,  a  man  of  the  most  severe 
and  delicate  conscience,  should  have  made  his  hero 
a  slave-dealer,  and  should  display  a  perfect  insen 
sibility  to  anything  culpable  in  the  traffic.  Moral 
ity  has  taken  a  great  step  hi  advance  since  that 
day,  or,  at  least,  it  has  thrown  a  strong  light  upon 
one  spot,  with  perhaps  a  corresponding  shadow 
upon  some  other.  The  next  age  may  shift  the  illu 
mination,  and  show  us  sins  as  great  as  that  of  the 
slave  trade,  but  which  now  enter  into  the  daily 
practice  of  men  claiming  to  be  just  and  wise." 

When  the  anti-slavery  agitation  was  going  on 
Hawthorne  did  not  unite  in  it,  because  he  did  not 
see  with  us  the  millennial  America  which  was  to 
blossom  like  a  rose  so  soon  as  slavery  was  cleared 
away.  And  perhaps  he  did  see  beyond  that  light 
cast  upon  slavery  a  corresponding  shadow  of  war 
darkening  the  whole  land.  However  that  may  be, 
the  world  set  in  Hawthorne's  heart  was  the  world 
as  it  existed,  —  a  world  all-inclusive,  with  heights 
and  depths,  like  the  earth  as  seen  by  Socrates. 
"  The  pure  earth  is  situated  in  the  pure  heavens," 
said  Socrates.  "  The  soul  which  has  passed  through 
life  with  purity  and  moderation  obtains  the  gods 
for  fellow  travelers  and  guides,  and  rests  in  the 
abode  suited  to  it.  There  are  in  truth  many  and 


124  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

worshipful  places  in  the  earth,  and  it  is  neither  of 
such  a  kind  nor  of  such  a  magnitude  as  is  supposed 
by  those  who  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  the  earth." 

One  of  his  friends  cried  out :  "  Oh,  Socrates,  it 
is  a  sufficient  end  of  life  to  listen  to  those  dis 
courses  of  thine."  And  in  reading  the  tales  of 
Hawthorne  I  sometimes  feel  inclined  to  admit  that 
the  world  into  which  his  imagination  guides  us, 
even  with  that  nethermost  realm  where  Hester 
Prynne  sits  with  her  scarlet  letter,  even  where  the 
Blithedale  Utopia  vanishes  away,  —  arenas  of  the 
eternal  conflict  between  Ormuzd  and  Ahriman,  giv 
ing  play  to  the  finest  and  most  heroic  qualities 
of  human  nature,  —  even  that  world  has  its  ideal 
charm.  It  is  a  sufficient  raison  d'etre  even  for 
witch-and-quaker-persecuting  Puritanism  that  it 
produced  at  last  a  genius  able  to  show  its  grandest 
soul  in  the  woman  it  tortured  and  branded.  Ah, 
how  deep  Hawthorne  went  into  this  world,  —  how 
far  beyond  its  conventionalism  ! 

The  American  artist  in  London,  George  Bough- 
ton,  once  painted  a  picture  of  Hester  Prynne,  and 
invited  his  friends  to  see  it.  It  was  a  masterpiece. 
There  stood  the  woman  with  her  marvelous  beauty, 
the  old  English  letter  broidered  on  her  breast, 
calm  in  her  fortitude  and  sincerity.  The  company 
stood  entranced  before  it.  On  a  table  lay  the  em 
broidered  letter  which  the  artist  had  designed,  and 
some  of  us  were  examining  it.  In  the  company  was 


THE   WAYSIDE  125 

a  lady  of  high  position,  cultivated  and  refined,  a 
devoted  reader  of  Hawthorne.  Most  of  us  had 
turned  away  and  were  chatting  with  Mrs.  Bough- 
ton  about  her  approaching  fancy  ball ;  but  that 
lady  still  stood  before  the  picture.  She  presently 
snatched  up  the  scarlet  letter  and  said  to  the  artist, 
"  Lend  me  this  letter !  I  will  wear  it  at  your  fancy 
ball !  I  will  come  as  Hester  Prynne ! "  She  was 
speedily  surrounded  by  the  other  ladies,  and  told 
it  would  never  do.  "  Surely,"  she  said,  "  nobody 
can  see  anything  but  nobleness  in  Hester  Prynne." 
But  she  was  reminded  that  some  would  be  present 
who  had  never  read  "  The  Scarlet  Letter,"  and 
that  it  would  require  the  genius  of  Hawthorne  to 
create  anew  for  Mrs.  Grundy  the  woman  as  she  and 
Boughton  saw  her. 

After  what  I  have  quoted  from  Hawthorne  about 
seeing  heaven  reflected  in  the  depths  of  his  own  spirit, 
and  what  I  have  said  of  all  the  Utopias  already  real 
ized  in  that  world  in  his  heart,  it  should  be  added 
that  he  did  in  one  direction  impose  a  lien  upon  the 
future,  —  just  one.  That  was  with  regard  to  the 
position  of  woman.  I  do  not  believe  that  there  is 
a  sweeter  page  in  literature  than  that  at  the  close  of 
"  The  Scarlet  Letter,"  where  Hester  is  seen,  —  her 
troubles  past,  the  letter  no  longer  a  stigma,  bring 
ing  to  her  women  with  wasted  and  burdened  hearts. 
"  Hester  comforted  and  counseled  them  as  best  she 
might.  She  assured  them,  too,  of  her  firm  belief 


12C  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

that,  at  some  brighter  period,  when  the  world 
should  have  grown  ripe  for  it,  in  Heaven's  own 
time,  a  new  truth  would  be  revealed  in  order  to 
establish  the  whole  relation  between  man  and  wo 
man  on  a  surer  ground  of  mutual  happiness."  The 
angel  and  apostle  is  to  be  a  woman.  That  is  in 
1850.  Two  years  later  "  The  Blithedale  Romance  " 
brings  evidence  that  Hawthorne  has  thought  out 
all  that  matter  maturely.  "  I  will  give  you  leave, 
Zenobia,  to  fling  your  utmost  scorn  upon  me,  if  you 
ever  hear  me  utter  a  sentiment  unfavorable  to  the 
widest  liberty  which  woman  has  yet  dreamed  of. 
I  would  give  her  all  she  asks,  and  add  a  great 
deal  more,  which  she  will  not  be  the  party  to  de 
mand,  but  which  men,  if  they  were  generous  and 
wise,  would  grant  of  their  own  free  motion."  He 
will  go  to  church  often  enough  when  women  are 
the  preachers.  He  envies  the  Catholics  their  Ma 
donna. 

But  even  here  Hawthorne  was  too  much  of  an 
artist  to  try  and  shape  a  scheme  or  a  system.  The 
nature  in  which  he  was  interested  was  human  na 
ture.  Not  the  mountains,  but  the  human  profile  on 
one  of  them,  inspired  "  The  Great  Stone  Face," 
the  matchless  allegory.  "  Going  to  the  village  yes 
terday  afternoon  "  —  this  is  at  Lenox  —  "I  saw 
the  face  of  a  beautiful  woman  gazing  at  me  from 
a  cloud.  It  was  the  full  face,  not  the  bust.  It  had  a 
sort  of  mantle  on  the  head,  and  a  pleasant  expres- 


THE  WAYSIDE  127 

sion  of  countenance.  The  vision  lasted  while  I  took 
a  few  steps,  and  then  vanished.  I  never  before  saw 
near  by  so  distinct  a  cloud-picture." 

Hawthorne  framed  no  cosmos,  nor  formulated 
any  philosophical  or  sociological  system.  For  his 
world  was  not  academic;  it  was  not  mirrored  in 
his  intellect,  but  in  his  heart ;  and  his  intellect  was 
the  artist  which  created  and  gave  life  to  the  forms 
which  he  saw  in  that  heart-world  and  which  ex 
cited  his  sentiment  and  imagination. 

And  as  life  goes  on,  and  so  many  aims  to  which 
we  devoted  years  of  labor  and  sorrow  turn  to  illu 
sions,  —  cloud-pictures  that  vanished  after  we  had 
taken  further  steps,  —  do  we  not  find  that,  after  all, 
Hawthorne's  method  is  the  only  way  in  which  the 
world  can  be  truly  reported  ? 

No  one  who  ever  saw  Hawthorne  can  forget  his 
wonderful  eyes.  They  were  search-lights,  but  soft 
ones,  —  the  look  not  that  of  curiosity,  but  of  inter 
est  and  attentiveness.  The  heart  looked  through 
them  and  saw  into  the  heart  of  what  was  before 
him.  This  makes  his  "  Note-Books  "  a  romance  of 
the  author  himself  equal  to  those  he  published. 
The  art  critics  wonder  at  his  estimates  of  pictures 
and  statues  in  Italy,  because  he  sees  what  the  dil 
ettanti  cannot  see.  The  great  are  sometimes  laid 
low  and  the  lowly  exalted  by  his  strange  touchstone. 
He  turns  away  from  Michael  Angelo's  "  Last  Judg 
ment  "  because  he  finds  himself  taking  sides  with 


128  HAWTHOKNE  CENTENARY 

the  wicked  against  the  fierce,  pitiless  Christ  con 
demning  them  ;  and  the  great  name  of  Guido  does 
not  prevent  his  seeing  that  the  Archangel  chaining 
up  Satan  is  altogether  too  dainty ;  not  a  loose 
string  of  his  sandal,  not  a  ruffled  feather  of  his 
wing,  to  indicate  that  there  has  been  any  conflict 
at  all.  If  it  is  simply  Omnipotence  at  work  to 
crush  Satan,  why  need  the  Archangel  be  there  at 
all,  and  why  bear  a  spear?  The  angel  seems  pos 
ing.  But  wherever  Hawthorne  sees  a  heart  he  re 
cognizes  it,  even  if  the  artist  be  unknown  and  the 
picture  such  as  others  pass  by.  "  Occasionally  to 
day,  I  was  sensible  of  a  certain  degree  of  emotion 
in  looking  at  an  old  picture ;  as,  for  example,  by 
a  large,  dark,  ugly  picture  of  Christ  bearing  the 
cross  and  sinking  beneath  it,  when,  somehow  or 
other,  a  sense  of  his  agony,  and  the  fearful  wrong 
that  mankind  did  (and  does)  its  Redeemer,  and  the 
scorn  of  His  enemies,  and  the  sorrow  of  those  who 
loved  Him,  came  knocking  at  my  heart  and  got 
entrance  there.  Once  more  I  deem  it  a  pity  that 
Protestanism  should  have  entirely  laid  aside  this 
mode  of  appealing  to  the  religious  sentiment." 
When  I  stood  before  that  same  picture  Hawthorne's 
note  upon  it  came  knocking  at  my  heart,  so  plain 
tive,  this  unchurched  man  of  fifty-four,  returning 
like  Mignon  to  her  father's  hall,  where 

"  Marble  statues  stand  and  say  each  one, 
What 's  this,  poor  child,  to  thee  they  've  done  ?  " 


THE  WAYSIDE  129 

I  found  it  a  wonderful  experience,  when  writing 
the  "  Life  of  Hawthorne,"  to  go  through  all  those 
places  in  Rome  and  Florence  with  his  "  Note-Books  " 
and  "  The  Marble  Faun  "  in  my  hand.  In  previous 
years  I  had  gone  through  the  galleries  repeatedly, 
with  admiration,  but  with  appreciation  more  or 
less  determined  by  my  special  studies.  But  Haw 
thorne  transfused  with  his  blood  some  I  had  idly 
passed  by ;  they  became  alive.  And  so  it  was  with 
the  houses  associated  with  Hawthorne.  The  Pa 
lazzo  della  Scimmia  has  lost  its  ancient  name  and 
legend :  it  is  now  Hilda's  Tower,  and  the  Countess 
Marone,  lady  of  the  house,  has  decorated  the  tower 
with  a  fresco  of  the  alighting  dove.  In  Florence, 
Lady  Hobart,  who  occupied  Montauto  Villa,  told 
me  of  an  old  servant  who  declared  that  Signer 
Hawthorne  used  to  sit  long  all  alone  on  top  of 
the  tower,  drawing  up  the  last  ladder  after  him. 
Lower  down  in  the  tower  was  the  small  oratory 
which  Una  had  to  herself.  It  had  apparently  been 
an  oratory  long  before  the  Hawthornes  lived 
there,  and  the  artificial  flowers  and  little  waxen 
angels  were  so  darkened  by  dust  that  Lady  Hobart 
feared  they  would  have  to  be  cleared  away.  I  was 
sometimes  reminded  of  Balzac's  story  of  the  Sara 
cen  sorceress  burned  at  Tours,  whose  demoniac 
nature  was  recognized  by  a  laborer,  who  declared 
that  wherever  she  walked  roses  budded  in  winter 
time.  When  the  antiquaries  and  scientific  explorers 


130  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

of  Rome  heard  that  an  American  was  there  follow 
ing  the  author's  tracks,  they  demanded  a  lecture  on 
Hawthorne  in  Rome,  and  then  they  helped  me  to 
write  it ;  and  in  the  end  I  am  ready  to  testify,  on 
their  authority,  that  where  Hawthorne  had  passed 
things  budded ;  new  species  of  mosses  or  moss-roses 
were  found  on  old  ruins,  and  the  stones  of  Rome 
revealed  new  inscriptions. 

Ah,  how  beloved  was  that  man  !  He  lamented 
that  he  could  not  write  a  sunshiny  book,  but  wher 
ever  he  moved  he  carried  sunshine.  You  had  only 
to  mention  the  name  of  Hawthorne  in  houses  he 
had  entered  throughout  Europe,  and  every  face 
beamed  with  sunshine.  If  you  asked  old  Hiram 
Powers,  or  Villarys,  or  the  Buffering,  or  Storys, 
just  what  Hawthorne  said  to  them,  they  remem 
bered  mainly  his  questions.  He  was  inclined  to 
learn  rather  than  teach,  but  there  was  a  preter 
natural  something  about  him,  he  was  a  beautiful 
incarnation  of  beautiful  visions  ;  like  the  self -mul 
tiplying  young  god  Krishna,  piping  to  the  shepherd 
esses,  —  who  each  had  him  for  a  partner  in  the 
dance,  —  he  had  touched  the  secret  in  every  breast, 
he  had  evoked  the  deeper  self,  and  these  awakened 
spirits  sped  to  him  like  the  doves  nestling  in  Hilda's 
tower,  each  also  a  carrier  of  his  or  her  confidences, 
however  infinitesimal,  as  a  grateful  tribute  to  the 
genius  who  held  the  world  in  his  heart  and  lifted 
it  to  his  height. 


THE  WAYSIDE  131 

Just  now  when  my  friend  Mrs.  Elliott  was  talk 
ing  to  us  of  Italy,  I  thought  of  a  wonderful  picture 
at  Siena  of  St.  Francis  with  the  corpse  whispering 
in  his  ear.  Sent  for  by  a  woman  in  mental  anguish 
who  desired  to  confess,  St.  Francis  found  her  dead, 
but  calls  her  back  into  just  enough  consciousness  to 
unburden  her  heart.  I  think  of  Hawthorne  as  hav 
ing  summoned  into  life  the  extinct  Puritanism  of 
persecution,  —  the  Puritanism  hard  and  cruel, — 
just  long  enough  to  unburden  its  heart  and  make 
its  confession.  So  he  summoned  defunct  Brook 
Farm,  and  even  ancient  Rome. 

In  a  recent  article  it  is  said  that  Emerson  dis 
suaded  people  from  reading  Hawthorne.  I  feel 
certain  that  is  not  true.  I  was  entirely  in  his  hands, 
sitting  at  his  feet,  during  the  entire  summer  of  1853, 
when  I  resided  on  Ponkatasset  Hill ;  he  advised 
the  books  I  read  when  a  crude  youth  from  Virginia ; 
he  gave  me  information  and  his  opinions  of  writers. 
He  said  of  Robert  Browning's  "  Paracelsus  "  that 
it  was  "  the  wail  of  the  nineteenth  century."  If 
he  were  warning  people  against  Hawthorne  I  must 
have  heard  it.  I  remember  once  talking  to  Emerson 
of  some  writer —  I  feel  pretty  sure  it  was  Hawthorne 
—  and  saying  that  although  he  seemed  to  see  the 
sombre  and  dark  in  life,  he  wrote  at  times  like  a  tran- 
scendentalist ;  and  Emerson  said  (I  remember  this 
perfectly) :  "  A  transcendentalist  is  one  who  has 
caught  a  glimpse  of  that  terrible  thing  that  we  are." 


132  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

Emerson  was  very  much  charmed  with  the  ac 
count  that  Hawthorne  gave  of  his  friend  Delia 
Bacon,  in  the  "  Kecollections  of  a  Gifted  Woman." 
And  I  may  say  during  that  long  time  Hawthorne 
was  at  Liverpool,  and  when  he  seemed  so  silent,  he 
was  himself  personally  passing  through  a  drama 
almost  as  wonderful  and  romantic  and  thrilling  as 
any  he  ever  wrote. 

Delia  Bacon  came  over  there  with  her  strange 
new  theory  of  Shakespeare  not  being  written  by 
Shakespeare  —  now  a  familiar  theory,  but  at  that 
time  all  in  that  poor  woman's  brain.  Hawthorne 
found  her  in  a  poor  London  lodging  and  in  ob 
scurity;  he  gave  her  money,  and  he  helped  her 
during  all  the  time  she  was  on  the  verge  of  insanity. 
Francis  Bennoch,  his  very  particular  friend,  and 
Charles  Flower,  mayor  of  Str  at  ford-on- A  von,  told 
me  they  never  had  seen  a  more  beautiful  and  tender 
solicitude  than  that  of  Hawthorne  for  that  lady. 
For  she  was  a  most  refined  and  elegant  woman ; 
she  was  fair  to  look  upon,  she  was  thoroughly  cul 
tivated,  she  had  been  one  of  the  most  cultured 
teachers  in  Boston,  belonging  to  a  high  and  learned 
family,  and  was  in  every  respect  a  most  attractive 
person.  Carlyle  said  he  was  most  impressed  by 
her  gracious  dignity  and  modesty  in  the  discussion 
of  her  paradoxical  views.  Bennoch  told  me  that 
Hawthorne,  though  not  then  pecunious,  gave  Delia 
Bacon  over  a  thousand  dollars  out  of  his  own 


THE  WAYSIDE  133 

pocket,  and  so  delicately,  with  such  tact,  that  she 
should  not  be  under  obligations ;  and  when  at  last 
her  book  was  to  be  published,  he  wrote  the  intro 
duction,  although  there  was  nothing  in  the  world 
likely  to  give  him  more  trouble  than  to  be  asso 
ciated  with  her  theory  of  Shakespeare,  which  ap 
peared  to  him  to  be  perfectly  wild. 

And  so  it  was  until  the  time  when  she  stayed  up 
all  night  at  the  grave  of  Shakespeare,  where  that 
famous  inscription  was,  —  the  sexton  all  the  time 
watching  her  to  see  that  no  violence  was  done  the 
grave,  —  and  when  in  the  darkness  her  mind  en 
tirely  gave  way.  Here,  then,  in  that  apparently 
silent  time,  when  no  novel  was  written,  a  very 
thrilling  one  was  lived,  in  which  Hawthorne  was 
the  main  figure. 

In  the  last  year  of  his  life,  too,  this  strange  sen 
sitive  man  was  moving  in  a  tragical  succession  of 
events.  His  beloved  daughter  Una  was  hovering 
between  life  and  death.  When  Una  was  better  it 
could  be  told  by  Hawthorne's  cheerier  look  and  step 
on  the  street.  When  her  life  and  mind  flickered 
up,  he  flickered  up ;  when  Una  sank,  he  sank ;  in 
my  belief  he  perished  by  the  loss  of  that  daughter. 
Una,  in  some  strange,  mystical  way,  seemed  to 
represent  the  soul  and  spirit  of  Hawthorne. 

There  has  been  discovered  by  my  friend  Went- 
worth  Higginson  a  portraiture  of  that  girl  by  her 
father,  which  I  consider  one  of  the  most  exquisite 


134  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

things  ever  written.  It  is  complete,  and  Miss  Mar 
garet  Lothrop  will  read  it  to  us.  The  extract  was 
then  read  by  Miss  Lothrop.  Letters  from  Dr. 
Richard  Garnett  of  London  and  Mrs.  Annie  Fields 
were  also  read. 

LETTER   FROM   DR.   RICHARD   GARNETT 

27  TANZA  ROAD,  HAMPSTEAD, 
LONDON,  June  25,  1904. 

DEAR  MADAM  :  I  receive  with  great  satisfac 
tion,  but  with  no  surprise,  the  information  commu 
nicated  to  me  in  a  letter  from  Colonel  T.  W.  Hig- 
ginson  that  the  centennial  anniversary  of  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne's  birth  is  to  be  celebrated  at  his  home 
in  Concord,  now  in  your  occupation.  Of  all  Amer 
ican  writers  of  imaginative  genius,  I  should  think 
there  was  none  so  secure  of  centennial,  and  of  re 
peated  centennial,  celebration  as  Hawthorne,  be 
cause  there  is  no  other  whose  work  has  so  little 
dependence  upon  merely  temporary  and  accidental 
elements.  The  finest  and  most  characteristic  of  his 
ideas  and  emotions  lie,  like  Poe's  "  wild  weird 
world  out  of  space,  out  of  time,"  but  even  when 
describing  ordinary  men  and  manners  he  seems  to 
have  the  instinct  of  selecting  what  in  them  is  per 
manently  interesting  and  therefore  permanently 
readable.  The  scenes  of  common  life  in  "  The 
Blithedale  Romance  "  and  "  The  Marble  Faun " 
are  as  fresh  as  ever.  I  can  see  no  reason  why  any 


THE  WAYSIDE  135 

part  of  Hawthorne's  imaginative  work  should  be 
less  interesting  now  than  on  the  day  when  it  was 
written,  or  why  it  should  be  less  attractive  on 
future  centennials  than  on  this. 

This  being  a  centennial  occasion,  I  have  confined 
my  remarks  to  the  durability  of  Hawthorne's  writ 
ings,  which  I  need  not  say  implies  other  qualities 
of  the  highest  order. 

With  sincere  wishes  for  the  success  of  your  fete, 
and  congratulating  you  upon  the  president  you  have 
secured  in  Colonel  Higginson,  I  remain,  dear 
Madam,  most  truly  yours, 

EICHARD  GARNETT. 

MRS.  HOWE:  Before  we  separate,  a  tribute  is 
due  to  Mrs.  Lothrop,  the  one  who  devised  the 
whole  plan  and  who  has  been  the  spirit  of  the 
occasion  which  brought  us  together,  and  as  our 
hostess  has  had  us  in  her  house.  I  know  that  this 
is  the  feeling  of  you  all,  and  you  can  express  it  in 
the  usual  way. 

The  audience  then  passed  a  vote  of  thanks  to 
Mrs.  Lothrop,  and  the  meeting  adjourned. 


FOURTH  DAY 
JULY  SEVENTH 


FOUKTH  DAY 
JULY  SEVENTH 

THE  exercises  of  the  fourth  and  concluding  day 
were  presided  over  by  MR.  CHARLES  FRANCIS 
ADAMS,  who  introduced,  as  the  first  speaker  of  the 
morning,  Judge  Keyes  of  Concord. 

ADDRESS   OF   HON.    JOHN   S.    KEYES 

It  is  very  evident  after  what  you  have  had  from 
these  young  men,  whom  I  see  about  me,  that  Mrs. 
Lothrop  thought  it  desirable  to  show  the  differ 
ence,  —  and  let  you  understand  something  of  what 
is  so  necessary,  —  the  garrulity  of  old  age  in  regard 
to  things  so  long  ago  that  nobody  else  remembers 
them. 

Now  my  recollections  of  Mr.  Hawthorne  go  back, 
I  am  afraid,  something  longer  than  those  of  any  one 
else  in  this  room,  or  in  this  town  of  Concord,  where 
I  have  got  to  be  somehow  the  oldest  inhabitant, 
and  perhaps  the  only  one  who  knew  him  when  he 
first  brought  his  bride  here,  a  charming  lady,  a 
very  beautiful  and  interesting  married  couple  who 
impressed  themselves  very  strongly  on  myself  and 
Mrs.  Keyes,  as  we  were  then  contemplating  enter 
ing  just  that  stage  of  human  happiness,  and  were 


140  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

extremely  interested  as  a  neighbor  of  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Hawthorne  in  their  settlement  in  the  Old  Manse. 
It  was  a  very  beautiful  settlement  in  itself,  as  per 
haps  many  of  you  know.  Mrs.  Hawthorne  had  or 
namented  the  set  of  furniture  for  their  chamber  with 
Flaxman's  illustrations  —  beautifully  done  by  her 
own  hand,  and  making,  when  we  were  permitted  to 
see  them,  one  of  the  most  artistic  and  delightful 
new  experiments  to  us  certainly  in  the  furnishing 
of  their  home.  That  brought  me  somewhat  into 
connection  with  Mr.  Hawthorne ;  and  a  little  later, 
after  they  had  got  to  feel  at  home  in  Concord, 
there  was  a  reading-room  established  in  the  old 
building  next  the  Tolman  house,  under  the  burying 
hill,  to  which  in  some  way,  I  have  forgotten  quite 
how,  I  was  the  means  of  inducing,  perhaps,  Mr. 
Hawthorne  to  become  a  member.  It  was  furnished 
with  the  newspapers  of  the  day,  of  which  there 
were  only  two  dailies  then  amounting  to  anything 
in  Boston,  and  he  used  to  come  there  and  read 
those  almost  regularly. 

Then  he  had  quite  an  interest  in  the  Democratic 
politics  of  the  day,  which  through  the  change  in  the 
administration  had  lost  him  the  custom  house  at 
Salem,  and  so  was  to  be  found  almost  daily,  as  I 
have  said, reading  his  favorite  Boston  "Post," then 
edited  and  very  well  edited  by  Nathaniel  Greene, 
who  became  quite  famous  in  that  capacity  in  those 
days,  which  these  younger  men,  I  dare  say,  hardly 


THE  WAYSIDE  141 

recall.  It  was  his  usual  time  to  come  after  our 
dinner  hour,  which  was  then  universally  in  Concord 
twelve  o'clock.  I  went  there  to  receive  the  news 
and  smoke  a  cigar,  and  found  him,  or  he  came  about 
the  same  time,  usually.  We  had  considerable  talk 
over  the  politics,  as  I  was  on  the  other  side  of  the 
question,  and  was  very  glad  to  get  his  view  of  the 
Democracy  of  those  days  ;  and  then  I  would  occa 
sionally  meet  him  on  the  river,  where  he  had  a  boat, 
as  well  as  I,  and  we  took  our  cruises,  not  together, 
but  usually  in  different  directions,  but  with  plea 
sant  salutations,  and  he  was  very  charming  in  spite 
of  his  shyness.  No  person,  I  think,  ever  spoke  with 
him  that  did  n't  feel  that  he  had  received  something 
of  a  blessing,  if  he  had  brought  out  even  the  trace 
of  a  smile  on  his  handsome  face.  I  remember 
hardly  anything  more  distinctly  of  his  first  residence 
here  than  I  have  told  you,  and  perhaps  I  have 
dwelt  too  long  upon  it.  But  of  his  second  residence, 
the  one  which  came  while  the  height  of  the  presi 
dential  campaign  was  going  on,  I  remember  very 
well  the  occasion  in  which,  having  his  classmate  and 
friend  a  candidate  for  the  presidency,  Hon.  Frank 
lin  Pierce,  a  visitor  at  his  house,  he  invited  all  the 
Democrats  of  Concord  to  come  to  the  reception  at 
his  house  to  meet  the  candidate ;  and  they  came,  I 
rather  think  a  very  large  portion  of  them,  and  it 
was  a  very  grand  occasion  to  them  to  see  an  actual 
live  candidate  for  the  presidency,  as  I  doubt 


142  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

whether  any  one  of  them  had  ever  seen  one  before. 
This  assemblage  was  a  peculiar  one.  The  demo 
cracy  of  that  time  was  not  the  Irish  democracy  of 
to-day,  but  the  rough,  older,  New  England  Demo 
crats,  who  had  held  to  their  faith  from  the  days  of 
the  Revolution.  The  presentation  of  those  men  to 
the  candidate  by  Mr.  Hawthorne,  a  scene  that  I 
think  those  of  you  who  have  heard  or  read  of  him 
can  imagine,  was  an  extremely  interesting  one. 
Later  than  that  I  recall  —  and  this  is  the  only  one 
I  will  trouble  you  with  before  giving  you  what  will 
be  so  much  better  for  you  to  hear  than  anything 
I  can  say.  At  the  reception  given  to  him  by  Mr. 
Emerson  on  his  return  from  Italy,  he  had  changed  so 
much  with  his  experience  abroad,  with  his  growth  in 
social  matters  certainly,  that  we  were  all  surprised 
at  the  ease  and  charm  and  pleasure  of  his  manner 
as  the  company  gathered  by  Mr.  Emerson  received 
him  with  open  arms,  and  with  a  welcome  that  I 
feel  sure  went  to  his  heart  and  pleased  him  more 
than  many  incidents  of  his  life  abroad.  He  was  de 
lightfully  free  from  shyness,  free  from  any  special 
embarrassment,  and  glad  to  be  home  again  in  his  old 
Concord  and  glad  to  greet  his  neighbors  who  came 
to  see  him. 

MR.  ADAMS  :  Excuse  me.  That  is  interesting ; 
so  interesting  that  I  want  to  interject  a  question. 
Do  you  think  the  freedom  from  shyness  you  de- 


THE  WAYSIDE  143 

scribe  was  due  to  Hawthorne's  life  and  experiences 
abroad,  especially  his  social  experiences  while  in 
Italy  and  on  the  continent ;  or  was  it  due  to  the 
summer-like  prosperity  of  his  later  period,  and  his 
more  congenial  environment,  as  the  result  of  which 
care  had  been  lifted  from  him,  and  so  the  man 
emerged  ? 

MR.  KEYES  :  I  did  not  know  him  well  enough  to 
answer  that  question,  but  think  both  had  undoubt 
edly  their  effect  on  him,  because  it  was  a  surprise 
to  us  all  who  were  there ;  we  had  never  dreamed 
hardly  that  there  would  be  such  a  charm  and  in 
terest  in  his  manner,  as  he  manifested  on  that  oc 
casion.  Those  who  knew  him  best  might  tell  (I  do 
not  claim  to  have  known  him  well  enough  to  have 
definite  ideas  as  to  what  caused  it).  He  was  a  very 
different  man  from  the  shy  recluse  he  was  when  he 
began  life  here. 

(Judge  Keyes  then  read  a  paper  with  some 
reminiscences  of  Hawthorne  and  appreciation  of 
his  work  by  EDWARD  W.  EMERSON,  but  as  the 
paper  was  read  first  at  the  Salem  celebration,  and 
is  printed  in  the  report  of  that  occasion,  it  is  not 
given  here.) 

MR,  ADAMS:  It  is  one  of  the  inconveniences 
of  impromptu  deliverance  that  the  speaker  is  apt 
afterwards  to  be  haunted  with  a  consciousness  of 


144  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

sins  both  of  omission  and  commission.  In  my  ex 
perience  the  sins  in  question  are  apt  to  be  pretty 
equally  divided ;  they  have  proved  so  in  this  case. 
When,  two  days  ago,  I  undertook  to  set  forth  my 
views  as  to  Hawthorne's  proper  place  in  literature, 
I  spoke  without  preparation,  giving  utterance,  as  I 
at  the  time  said,  to  thoughts  as  they  arose  in  me. 
Listening  to  the  interesting  letter  which  has  just 
been  read,  when  reference  was  made  in  it  to  Aunt 
Hepzibah,  in  the  "  House  of  Seven  Gables,"  it  sug 
gested  to  me,  I  know  not  why,  one  of  my  sins  of 
omission.  Before  calling  on  Mr.  Sanborn,  I  crave 
a  single  minute  to  make  confession  thereof.  My  so- 
doing  would,  I  am  sure,  be  very  grateful  to  Haw 
thorne  were  he  cognizant  of  it.  In  speaking,  last 
Tuesday,  of  the  character  delineations  constituting 
the  great  portrait  world-gallery  of  recognized  in 
dividualities,  I  said  that,  so  far  as  I  was  aware,  or 
could  then  recall,  America  had  in  all  contributed 
but  three.  Those  three  were  Irving's  Eip  Van 
Winkle,  Mrs.  Stowe's  Topsy,  and  Bret  Harte's 
Colonel  Starbottle.  But,  as  Judge  Keyes  was  speak 
ing,  suddenly  one  other  occurred  to  me,  the  creation 
of  a  contemporary  of  Hawthorne's,  and  associated 
peculiarly  with  him.  I  refer  to  Longfellow ;  he 
also  a  graduate  of  Bowdoin,  and  a  graduate  with 
Hawthorne. 

Not  long  since,  I  remember,  a  gentleman,  for 
whose  literary  judgment  I  did  not  entertain  so  high 


THE  WAYSIDE  145 

an  opinion  as  that  I  held  for  his  personal  character, 
—  he  being  a  somewhat  matter-of-fact  man,  —  said 
of  Longfellow  and  his  poetry :  "  Yes,  Longfellow 
was,  doubtless,  great  as  a  poet,  but  he  does  not 
appeal  to  me.  He  is  so  subtile  !  "  Without  stop 
ping  to  pass  on  the  justice  or  depth  of  this  criti 
cism,  I  want  to  add  one  more,  a  fourth,  to  my  list 
of  American  character  creations.  That  fourth  is 
Evangeline.  Last  month  I  had  occasion  to  visit  the 
British  Provinces,  passing  some  days  in  Nova 
Scotia,  in  attendance  on  the  tercentenary  cele 
bration  of  the  De  Monts  and  Champlain  settle 
ment,  which,  as  some  here  may  not  be  aware, 
was  at  what  is  now  Annapolis-Royal,  —  not  far 
from  Grand  Pre,  and  so  in  the  very  heart  of  the 
"  Evangeline  country."  I  freely  confess  to  a  sense 
of  amazement  as  I  was  made  to  realize  the  extent 
to  which  Longfellow,  in  that  poem,  written  nearly 
sixty  years  ago,  did  for  a  British  Province  what  Sir 
Walter  Scott  only  a  century  back  so  magnificently 
accomplished  for  Scotland.  He  threw  over  it  an 
abiding  veil  of  romance.  Wherever  you  there  go 
you  are  reminded  of  Grand  Pre,  —  you  are  con 
scious  you  are  in  the  land  of  Evangeline.  So, 
among  those  here  assembled,  — 

"  Ye  who  believe  in  affection  that  hopes,  and  endures,  and  is 

patient, 

Ye  who  believe  in  the  beauty  and  strength  of  woman's 
devotion," 


146  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

bear  with  me  this  single  moment,  while,  in  making 
good  an  omission,  I  do  but  render  justice  in  con 
necting  with  the  name  of  Hawthorne  the  name  of 
that  one  of  Hawthorne's  college  associates  whose 
literary  renown  can  alone  bear  comparison  with  his 
own.  Without  danger  of  contradiction,  I  think  I 
may  assert  that  those  two  contributed  largely  and 
permanently  to  the  most  prolific  period  of  New 
England  intellectual  germination. ' 

Mrs.  Lothrop  will  read  a  letter  from  Mrs.  Rose 
Hawthorne  Lathrop. 

MRS.  LOTHROP  :  I  have  a  letter  from  Mrs. 
Rose  Hawthorne  Lathrop,  from  her  summer  home, 
at  Hawthorne,  New  York,  where  she  is  ministering 
to  the  incurable  poor  who  are  under  her  care.  She 
telegraphed  me  yesterday  that  she  would  send  an 
other  letter  of  reminiscences  of  her  father.  This 
last  letter  arrived  last  night. 

ROSARY  HILL  HOME,  HAWTHORNE,  N.  Y.,  July  5. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  The  reason  that  I  have 
not  sent  a  paper  to  be  read,  about  my  father's  life 
in  Concord  as  I  saw  it,  is  that  I  am  no  longer  free 
to  use  my  time  if  the  sick  need  it  as  our  patients 
have  done  for  a  number  of  years  now.  The  order 
to  which  I  belong,  which  especially  combines  the 
active  life  with  prayer,  would  sanction  my  going  to 
Concord  for  so  important  an  occasion ;  but  as  yet 
the  women  tending  the  twenty-five  cancer  cases 


THE   WAYSIDE  147 

whom  we  harbor  in  the  Country  Home  are  too  few 
to  allow  any  of  us  to  fall  out  of  line  for  a  day. 

Your  last  kind  letter,  however,  gives  me  the  op 
portunity  to  express  at  least  a  few  thoughts,  to  be 
added  perhaps  to  the  bright  and  eloquent  words 
aroused  upon  the  hillside  which  possesses  so  many 
memories  of  great  souls  now  unseen,  whose  very 
presence  spoke,  so  that  we  hardly  needed  to  hear 
words  from  their  generous  lips  to  know  that  they 
had  blessed  us  in  their  thought. 

You  believe  that  this  Wayside  echoed  with  un 
spoken  words  as  it  traversed  the  homes  of  Haw 
thorne,  Alcott,  Emerson,  Channing,  Hoar,  and 
others.  However  noble  and  brilliant  their  speech, 
their  vigor  and  frankness  of  insight  called  forth 
the  uninterrupted  response  of  those  who  dwelt  near 
them. 

The  presence  of  my  father  filled  my  heart ;  he 
approached,  and  every  nerve  started  to  position. 
But  he  also,  though  silent,  filled  my  hearing  with 
suggestions  of  exalted  sentiment  far  more  vividly 
than  the  printed  pages  of  the  princes  of  literature, 
ready  for  their  mastery  of  the  imagination  in  the 
library,  or  than  the  unerring  lines  and  tones  of 
superlative  sculpture  and  painting,  recalled  in  the 
decorations  of  our  home. 

Since  my  harsh  contact  with  the  roughest  side  of 
the  world,  its  anguish  of  pain  and  ugly  disease,  its 
base  cruelties  and  frightful  lapses  into  evil,  I  keenly 


148  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

realize  the  beauty  of  the  rarefied  dignity  of  thought 
and  peacefulness  of  spirit  which  made  the  invisible 
home  of  my  parents  here,  of  which  the  outward 
reality  was  never  permitted  to  be  unworthy  in  its 
humble  sweetness  of  aspect,  enriched  with  every 
distinguished  reminiscence  and  all  faultless  crite- 
rions  only,  as  it  stood  for  them  beside  the  highroad 
of  common  things.  But  though  the  atmosphere  of 
our  home  was  full  of  honor  and  art,  and  its  refer 
ences  were  only  beautiful  and  inspiring,  and  all 
disgust  of  every  sort  was  eliminated  from  fancy  and 
motive,  yet  my  father's  personality,  containing  as  it 
did  the  analytical  knowledge  of  the  world's  great 
est  monstrosities  of  evil,  and  wearing,  in  the  latest 
years,  the  never-relinquished  black  of  one  who  had 
stood  beside  the  bier  of  human  nature,  —  yet  this 
personality  was  the  most  tranquil  that  The  Wayside 
held,  the  one  which,  to  the  end,  gave  greatest  de 
light  of  geniality  and  highest  counsel  of  demeanor. 
I  do  not  understand  whether  it  was  by  the  magnet 
ism  of  genius  (that  vividness  of  myriad  faculties), 
or  whether  it  was  by  the  sense  brought  to  me,  that 
my  father  had  mastered  a  wondrous  condensation 
of  perceptions  ;  but  I  seemed  to  have  a  delicious 
recognition  of  the  results  of  art  at  its  finest  flower 
ing,  and  the  enchanting  perfections  of  godlike  char 
acter,  when  we  met.  There  were  no  regrets ;  all  was 
joy  and  strength  in  these  meetings, brief  or  extended, 
even  after  his  great  mind  and  heart  appeared  to 


HAWTHORNE'S  PATH 

(On  the  hilltop) 


THE  WAYSIDE  149 

have  become,  as  I  said,  the  unforgetting  friend  of 
the  self-slain  race. 

"  Bab,"  as  he  then  called  me,  with  a  low,  cheery 
note  of  the  voice,  breathed  deep  as  he  came  near. 
His  full,  sensitive  but  nobly  strong  lips  were  nearer 
a  smile  than  a  sombre  droop ;  his  eyes  were  chiefly 
radiance,  though  often,  in  those  years,  full  of  the 
long  lights  of  revelation ;  seldom  sparkling  with 
the  lesser  beauty  of  frolicsome  sympathy,  as  I  had 
seen  them  shining  in  England.  "  Bab  "  was  silent 
as  the  toad  under  the  silent  flowers  beside  the  ter 
race  where  we  sometimes  sat  together,  or  as  the  pine 
needles  on  the  hill  which  rustled,  but  only  in  a  whis 
per,  under  his  feet,  as  we  walked  there  in  brisker 
autumn.  But  his  silence  kept  me  busily  occupied. 

Dear  Mrs.  Lothrop,  the  limit  of  time  is  reached 
for  me,  and  I  find  that  I  have  said  nothing  definitely 
descriptive  of  my  father's  life  at  the  Wayside. 
One  thing  I  will  add :  The  clearest  picture  in  my 
mind,  always  as  I  look  back  to  that  time  between 
1860  and  1864,  is  that  of  my  father  and  mother 
stepping  side  by  side  about  the  grounds,  looking  at 
a  branch  here  or  a  vine  there.  He  talked  then.  Her 
head  was  almost  always  lifted  ;  she  was  looking 
straight  forward  or  up  at  a  height  of  summer  love 
liness.  He  was  usually  looking  down,  though  not 
without  a  ready  willingness  to  follow  her  command, 
and  also  look  at  some  simple  grace  of  the  verdure 
or  sublimity  of  the  sky.  But  he  did  not  forget  the 


150  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

grass-blade  or  the  pebble  of  the  mystery  of  our 
earthly  sojourn. 

Very  truly  yours, 

M.  ALPHONSA  LATHROP,  O.  S.  D. 

The  following  paper  was  received  from  Mr. 
FRANK  PRESTON  STEARNS,  author  of  the  "  Life  of 
Bismarck,"  and  a  schoolmate  of  Hawthorne's  son. 

HAWTHORNE   AND   TRANSCENDENTALISM 

In  Hawthorne's  diary,  dated  August  22,  1842, 
we  read  the  account  of  a  memorable  meeting  be 
tween  Margaret  Fuller,  Emerson,  and  himself, 
which  took  place  that  afternoon  in  Sleepy  Hollow, 
whither  they  all  three  went  for  rest  and  recrea 
tion  without  previous  consultation  or  arrangement. 
Margaret  Fuller  was  first  on  the  ground,  and  Haw 
thorne  found  her  seated  under  the  pine-trees  read 
ing  a  book,  the  name  of  which  he  "  did  not  under 
stand  and  could  not  afterward  remember."  Such 
a  description  could  only  apply  to  Kant's  "  Critique 
of  Pure  Reason ; "  the  original  fountain  head  and 
gospel  of  transcendentalism. 

It  does  not  appear  that  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  ever 
studied  "  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason."  His  mind 
was  purely  of  the  artistic  order,  —  the  most  perfect 
type  of  an  artist,  one  might  say,  living  at  that  time, 
—  and  a  scientific  analysis  of  the  mental  faculties 
would  have  been  as  distasteful  to  him  as  the  dissec- 


THE   WAYSIDE  151 

tion  of  a  human  body.  History,  biography,  fiction, 
did  not  appear  to  him  as  a  logical  chain  of  cause 
and  effect,  but  as  a  succession  of  pictures  illustrat 
ing  an  ideal  determination  of  the  human  race.  He 
could  not  even  look  at  a  group  of  turkeys  without 
seeing  a  dramatic  situation  in  them.  In  addition  to 
this,  as  a  true  artist  he  was  possessed  of  a  strong 
dislike  for  everything  eccentric  and  abnormal ;  he 
wished  for  symmetry  in  all  things,  and  above  all 
in  human  actions  ;  and  those  restless,  unbalanced 
spirits,  who  attached  themselves  to  the  transcen 
dental  movement  and  the  anti-slavery  cause,  were 
particularly  objectionable  to  him.  It  has  been 
rightly  affirmed  that  no  revolutionary  movement 
could  be  carried  through  without  the  support  of 
that  ill-regulated  class  of  persons  who  are  always 
seeking  they  know  not  what,  and  they  have  their 
value  in  the  community,  like  the  rest  of  us ;  but 
Hawthorne  was  not  a  revolutionary  character,  and 
to  his  mind  they  appeared  like  so  many  obstacles  to 
the  peaceable  enjoyment  of  life.  His  motto  was 
to  live  and  let  live.  There  are  passages  in  his 
Concord  diary  in  which  he  refers  to  the  itinerant 
transcendentalist  in  no  very  sympathetic  manner. 

His  experience  at  Brook  Farm  may  have  helped 
to  deepen  this  feeling.  There  is  no  necessary  con 
nection  between  such  an  idyllic,  socialistic  experi 
ment  and  a  belief  in  the  direct  perception  of  a 
great  first  cause;  but  Brook  Farm  was  popularly 


152  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

supposed  at  that  time  to  be  an  emanation  of  tran 
scendentalism,  and  is  still  largely  so  considered.  He 
was  wearied  at  Brook  Farm  by  the  philosophical 
discussions  of  George  Ripley  and  his  friends,  and 
took  to  walking  in  the  country  lanes,  where  he 
could  contemplate  and  philosophize  in  his  own  fash 
ion,  which  after  all  proved  to  be  more  fruitful  than 
theirs.  Having  exchanged  his  interest  in  the  West 
Roxbury  association  for  the  Old  Manse  at  Concord, 
truly  a  poetic  bargain,  he  wrote  the  most  keenly 
humorous  of  his  shorter  sketches,  his  "Railroad 
Journey  to  the  Celestial  City,"  and  in  it  represented 
the  dismal  cavern  where  Bunyan  located  the  two 
great  enemies  of  true  religion,  the  Pope  and  Pagan, 
as  now  occupied  by  a  German  giant,  the  Transcen- 
dentalist,  who  "  makes  it  his  business  to  seize  upon 
honest  travelers  and  fat  them  for  his  table  with 
plentiful  meals  of  smoke,  mist,  moonshine,  raw 
potatoes,  and  sawdust." 

This  may  have  been  his  gentle  revenge  for  the 
unnecessary  discomforts  and  hardships  of  his  West 
Roxbury  life  ;  but  there  could  have  been  no  malice 
in  his  satire,  for  Mrs.  Hawthorne's  two  sisters, 
Mrs.  Mann  and  Miss  Peabody,  were  both  transcen- 
dentalists,  and  so  was  Horace  Mann  himself,  as  far 
as  we  know  definitely  in  regard  to  his  metaphysical 
creed.  Do  not  we  all  feel  at  times  that  the  search 
for  abstract  truth  is  like  a  diet  of  sawdust  and 
Scotch  mist  —  a  "  chimera  buzzing  in  a  vacuum  ?  " 


THE  WAYSIDE  153 

James  Russell  Lowell  similarly  attacked  Emer 
son  in  his  Class  Day  Poem,  and  afterward  became 
converted  to  Emerson's  views  through  the  influ 
ence  of  Maria  White.  It  is  possible  that  a  similar 
change  took  place  in  Hawthorne's  consciousness  ; 
although  his  consciousness  was  so  profound  and  his 
nature  so  reticent  that  what  happened  in  the  depths 
of  it  was  never  indicated  by  more  than  a  few  bub 
bles  at  the  surface.  He  was  emphatically  an  ideal 
ist,  as  every  truly  great  artist  must  be,  and  tran 
scendentalism  was  the  peculiar  garb  which  ideality 
wore  in  Hawthorne's  time.  He  was  a  philosopher 
after  a  way  of  his  own,  and  his  reflections  on  life  and 
manners  often  have  the  highest  value.  It  was  inev 
itable  that  he  should  feel  and  assimilate  something 
from  the  wave  of  German  thought  which  was  sweep 
ing  over  England  and  America ;  and  if  he  did  this 
unconsciously  it  was  so  much  the  better  for  the 
quality  of  his  art. 

There  are  evidences  of  this  even  among  his  ear 
liest  sketches.  In  his  account  of  "  Sunday  at  Home  " 
he  says :  "  Time  —  where  a  man  lives  not  —  what  is 
it  but  Eternity  ? "  Does  he  not  recognize  in  this 
condensed  statement  Kant's  theorem  that  time  is  a 
mental  condition,  which  only  exists  in  man,  and  for 
man,  and  has  no  place  in  the  external  world.  In 
fact,  it  only  exists  by  divisions  of  time,  and  it  is 
man  who  makes  the  divisions.  The  rising  of  the 
sun  does  not  constitute  time ;  for  the  sun  is  always 


154  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

rising  —  somewhere.  The  positivists  and  Herbert 
Spencer  deny  this,  and  argue  to  prove  that  time  is 
an  external  entity  —  independent  of  man  —  like 
electricity ;  but  Hawthorne  did  not  agree  with  them. 

He  evidently  trusted  the  validity  of  his  conscious 
ness.  In  that  exquisite  pastoral  "  The  Vision  of  the 
Fountain  "  he  says :  — 

"  We  were  aware  of  each  other's  presence,  not 
by  sight  or  sound  or  touch,  but  by  an  inward  con 
sciousness.  Would  it  not  be  so  among  the  dead?" 

You  have  probably  heard  of  the  German  who 
attempted  to  evolve  a  camel  out  of  his  inner  con 
sciousness.  That  and  similar  gibes  are  common 
among  those  persons  of  whom  the  Scriptures  tell 
us  that  they  are  in  the  habit  of  straining  at  gnats ; 
but  Hawthorne  evidently  believed  consciousness  to 
be  a  trustworthy  guide.  Why  should  he  not  ?  It 
was  the  consciousness  of  self  that  raised  man  above 
the  level  of  the  brute.  It  was  the  rock  from  which 
Moses  struck  forth,  the  fountain  of  everlasting  life. 

Again,  in  "Fancy's  Show-Box"  we  meet  with 
the  following :  "  Or,  while  none  but  crimes  perpe 
trated  are  cognizable  before  an  earthly  tribunal, 
will  guilty  thoughts,  —  of  which  guilty  deeds  are  no 
more  than  shadows,  —  will  these  draw  down  the  full 
weight  of  a  condemning  sentence  in  the  supreme 
court  of  eternity  ?  " 

Is  this  not  an  induction  or  corollary  to  the  pre 
ceding?  If  it  is  not  Kantian  philosophy,  it  is 


THE  WAYSIDE  155 

certainly  Goethean.  Margaret  Fuller  was  the  first 
American  critic,  if  not  the  first  of  all  critics,  to 
point  out  that  Goethe  in  writing  "  Elective  Affini 
ties  "  designed  to  show  that  an  evil  thought  may 
have  consequences  as  serious  and  irremediable  as 
an  evil  action,  —  in  addition  to  the  well-known 
homily  that  evil  thoughts  lead  to  evil  actions.  In 
his  "Hall  of  Fantasy  "  Hawthorne  mentions  Goethe 
and  Swedenborg  as  the  literary  idols  of  the  pre 
sent  time  who  may  be  expected  to  endure  through 
all  time.  Emerson  makes  the  same  prediction  in 
one  of  his  poems. 

The  essence  of  transcendentalism  is  the  assertion 
of  the  indestructibility  of  spirit — that  mind  is  more 
real  than  matter,  and  the  unseen  than  the  seen. 
"  Only  the  visible  has  value,"  said  Carlyle,  "  when 
it  is  based  on  the  invisible."  No  writer  of  the 
nineteenth  century  affirms  this  more  persistently 
than  Hawthorne,  and  in  none  of  his  romances  is 
the  principle  so  conspicuous  as  in  "  The  House  of 
the  Seven  Gables."  It  is  a  sister's  love  which,  like 
a  chord  stronger  than  steel,  binds  together  the  va 
rious  incidents  of  the  story ;  while  the  avaricious 
Judge  Pyncheon,  "  with  his  landed  estate,  public 
honors,  offices  of  trust  and  other  solid  unrealities" 
has  after  all  only  succeeded  in  building  a  card 
castle  for  himself  which  may  be  dissipated  by  a 
single  breath.  Holgrave,  the  daguerreotypist,  who 
serves  as  a  contrast  to  the  fictitious  judge,  is  a 


156  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

genuine  character,  and  may  stand  for  a  type  of  the 
young  New  England  liberal  of  1850  :  a  free  thinker, 
and  so  much  of  a  transcendentalist  that  we  suspect 
Hawthorne's  model  for  him  to  have  been  one  of  the 
younger  associates  of  the  Brook  Farm  experiment. 
He  is  evidently  studied  from  life,  and  Hawthorne 
says  of  him :  — 

"  Altogether,  in  his  culture  and  want  of  culture, 
in  his  crude,  wild,  and  misty  philosophy,  and  the 
practical  experience  that  counteracted  some  of  its 
tendencies;  in  his  magnanimous  zeal  for  man's 
welfare,  and  his  recklessness  of  whatever  the  ages 
had  established  in  man's  behalf ;  in  his  faith,  and 
in  his  infidelity;  in  what  he  had,  and  in  what  he 
lacked,  the  artist  might  fitly  enough  stand  forth  as 
the  representative  of  many  compeers  in  his  native 
land." 

This  is  a  sympathetic  portrait,  and  it  largely 
represents  the  class  of  young  men  who  went  to  hear 
Emerson  and  supported  Charles  Sumner.  In  the 
story,  Holgrave  achieves  the  reward  of  a  veracious 
nature  by  winning  the  heart  of  the  purest  and  love 
liest  young  woman  in  American  fiction. 

Following  similar  lines,  Hawthorne  had  antici 
pated  Darwin's  "Origin  of  Species  "  in  "  The  Marble 
Faun."  The  character  of  Donatello  is  an  evident 
attempt  to  reconcile  the  evolution  of  the  human  race 
from  the  lower  orders,  with  the  Oriental  tradition 
of  a  prehistoric  state  of  universal  peace  and  hap- 


THE  WAYSIDE  157 

piness,  which  was  followed  by  what  Alcott  called  a 
"  lapse."  The  faun  of  Greek  mythology  served  Haw 
thorne  as  the  missing  link,  —  and  even  scientific 
writers  think  there  may  be  something  in  this.  His 
Donatello  has  no  evil  tendencies,  but  enjoys  a  happy 
sensuous  existence,  and  is  as  delightful  a  companion 
as  an  innocent  child.  Yet,  he  falls  into  error,  and 
brings  misfortune  on  himself  and  those  he  loves, 
through  this  very  innocence  and  inexperience  of 
evil.  He  has  plucked  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  know 
ledge,  has  been  expelled  from  paradise,  and  has  ac 
quired  the  wisdom  of  experience  at  a  fearful  cost. 
His  fate  is  tragical ;  but  it  is  only  through  tragedy 
that  the  world  rises  to  a  higher  civilization  and  a 
purer  happiness. 

"  The  Marble  Faun  "  is  an  epic  allegory,  and  the 
truth  in  it  may  be  more  literal  than  is  generally 
supposed.  Not  only  have  we  known  Donatello  in 
real  life,  with  his  succession  of  tragical  episodes, 
but  Captain  Speke  also  discovered  in  Central 
Africa  a  negro  tribe,  uncontaminated  by  European 
traders,  and  innocent  of  guile  as  the  antelopes  upon 
their  own  plains ;  and  this  suggests  to  us  that  all 
families  and  races  of  men  may  have  passed  through 
the  Donatello  stage  of  existence.  We  remember 
the  Palmyra  of  Zenobia,  and  the  awful  fate  of  the 
Albigenses ;  later  instances,  cropping  out  like  an 
aftermath,  similar  though  not  the  same. 

The  depth  and  height  of  Hawthorne's  philosophy 


158  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

is  not  contained,  however,  in  these  few  pages. 
When  we  study  the  grammar  of  a  language,  we 
are  given  a  rule  to  learn,  and  an  example  to  illus 
trate  it.  Emerson  contributed  the  rules,  and  Haw 
thorne  the  examples.  If  the  former  wielded  greater 
influence  over  the  generation  in  which  he  lived,  the 
latter  will  have  a  more  extended  influence  over 
generations  to  come ;  for  we  remember  the  example 
after  the  exact  terms  of  the  rule  have  passed  from 
our  minds.  Such  was  the  purity  and  perfection  of 
Hawthorne's  art,  that  I  believe  he  will  outlive 
every  writer  of  his  time. 

ME.  ADAMS  :  My  friend  Mr.  Sanborn  will  now 
make  the  final  contribution  to  the  proceedings. 

(The  subject  of  Mr.  Sanborn's  address  was  "  The 
Friendships  of  Hawthorne.") 

ADDKESS   OF   F.    B.    SANBOKN 

I  suppose  the  common  impression  of  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne  is  that  he  was  a  shy,  unsocial  man, 
avoiding  human  intercourse,  and  with  but  few 
friends.  His  wide  sympathies  with  most  forms  of 
human  feeling  and  experience,  as  shown  in  his 
books,  would  seem  to  negative  this  judgment  of  his 
character,  and  entitle  him  to  many  friendships,  and 
much  intimate  intercourse  with  mankind.  How 
then  are  we  to  reconcile  this  apparent  contradic 
tion  or  inconsistency  ?  for  there  can  be  no  doubt 


THE  WAYSIDE  159 

that  he  was  shy,  and  often  painfully  embarrassed 
in  the  presence  of  more  than  one  person.  He 
avoided  publicity  more  than  any  of  his  Concord 
associates  among  our  famous  authors,  and  was 
seldom  seen  here  in  any  house  but  his  own.  Nor 
did  he  often  walk  the  streets;  choosing  for  his 
daily  exercise  some  unfrequented  pathway,  or  the 
hour  of  twilight,  when  his  presence  would  be  less 
observed.  The  latter  was  his  habit  in  Salem,  as 
his  sister  Elizabeth  told  her  nephew  Julian.  She 
said,  "  Your  father  (in  Salem)  kept  his  very  ex 
istence  a  secret,  as  far  as  possible.  In  the  evening, 
after  tea,  he  went  out  for  about  an  hour,  whatever 
the  weather  was."  In  Bowdoin  College,  ten  years 
earlier,  his  greatest  pleasure  was  to  ramble  alone 
or  with  a  single  comrade,  in  the  great  stretch  of 
pine  forest  which  then  lay  near  the  village  of 
Brunswick,  —  as  he  says  himself,  in  a  letter  to  his 
classmate,  Horatio  Bridge,  —  "  gathering  blueber 
ries  in  study  hours  under  the  tall  academic  pines, 
or  watching  the  great  logs  as  they  tumbled  along 
the  current  of  the  Androscoggin ;  two  idle  lads, 
doing  a  hundred  things  that  the  Faculty  never 
heard  of."  He  afterwards  ascribed  his  unsocial 
ways  to  his  long  secluded  life  in  the  deeper  forest 
around  Sebago  Lake,  where  his  uncles  owned  much 
land,  and  where  one  of  them,  and  often  their  sister, 
his  mother,  long  resided.  The  habits  then  formed 
he  declared  that  he  could  not  shake  off ;  and  all 


160  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

who  knew  him  intimately  will  admit  this  as  agree 
ing  with  their  knowledge  of  him.  Yet  Hawthorne 
was  a  man  of  warm  affections  and  lively  imagina 
tion,  —  qualities  that  attract  and  retain  friends ; 
and  had  also  a  steadiness  of  character  not  always 
granted  to  those  who  share  with  him  the  poet's  gift 
of  sensibility. 

We  shall  therefore  find  that  he  constantly  at 
tracted  friends,  and  rather  sparingly  allowed  in 
timacies,  with  a  few  persons  at  a  time,  but  with 
many  consecutively  ;  and  that,  when  he  had  early 
formed  his  purpose  of  authorship  in  the  province 
of  fiction,  —  the  romance  and  the  short  story  or 
psychologic  sketch  being  his  forte,  —  he  took  natu 
rally  to  studies  of  human  nature  in  all  ranks  of  life. 
This  purpose  forbade  him  to  be  generally  unsocial ; 
and  his  way  of  life  in  college,  and  during  those 
years,  when  he  traveled  about  New  England  and 
New  York  in  stage-coaches  and  on  canals,  brought 
him  into  daily  contact  with  every  sort  and  condi 
tion  of  men,  so  far  as  the  sparse  population  of  the 
country  could  then  afford  him  opportunity.  It 
must  be  remembered  that  when  the  boy  Hawthorne 
was  roaming  in  the  Maine  woods,  and  fishing  in 
the  streams  and  lakes  of  Cumberland  County,  that 
whole  State  contained  less  than  300,000  people, 
and  all  New  England  had  hardly  two  millions. 
Boston,  when  Hawthorne  first  became  an  author, 
had  but  60,000  inhabitants,  and  Salem  but  13,000 ; 


THE  WAYSIDE  161 

and  when  he  was  traversing  the  Berkshire  hills  and 
valleys  for  days  and  weeks  in  1838,  there  were 
fewer  people  in  the  whole  county  than  are  now 
resident  in  Adams,  North  Adams,  and  Williams- 
town.  His  quick  eye  observed  and  his  ready  pen 
noted  down  every  variety  of  person  seen  in  his  wan 
derings,  and  hardly  a  gesture  or  a  glance  of  the 
eye  escaped  him,  —  as  we  may  see  in  reading  his 
"  American  Note-Books."  This  was  his  treasury  of 
fact  and  impression,  from  w.hich  he  drew  those 
vivid  portrayals  of  imaginary  characters,  so  like, 
and  yet  so  unlike  the  persons  we  meet  in  every 
day  life.  Each  one  is  a  type,  yet  all  bear  the  Haw 
thorne  stamp,  ineffaceable,  on  their  special  features ; 
unless  we  choose  to  regard  them  as  externalized 
passions  and  emotions  (arrayed  in  the  costume  of 
the  period  allotted  to  them,  but  showing  forth  the 
internal  thoughts  and  sentiments  of  Hawthorne 
himself),  contending  with  each  other  and  reflect 
ing  each  its  own  light  upon  the  others :  an  unreal 
world,  garbed  in  the  habiliments  of  reality,  but 
shadowy  and  flitting,  like  the  figures  in  a  dream. 
Yet  he  treats  them  honorably  and  friendly ;  he 
deals  honestly  by  his  characters,  and  takes  no.  mean 
advantage  even  of  the  baser  ones  ;  this  shows  him 
to  have  the  generosity  a  friend  should  have,  while 
yet  his  eyes  are  keen  to  spy  faults. 

Among  the  orators  and  essayists  who  have  used 
this  centennial  anniversary  of  Hawthorne's  birth  to 


162  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

pass  judgment  upon  his  genius  and  character,  one  of 
the  most  suggestive  —  Mr.  Perry  at  Bowdoin  Col 
lege  the  other  day  —  has  compared  him  to  Shake 
speare's  Hamlet.  Far-fetched  as  this  may  at  first 
appear,  there  is  much  in  it  worth  considering.  The 
real  novelist  and  the  imaginary  prince  are  both 
mysterious  natures ;  we  see  what  they  may  signify 
in  their  reason  and  their  unreason,  their  matter  of 
fact  and  their  wild  imaginings  ;  but  we  cannot 
fathom  them  quite.  The  matter  of  Hamlet's  life 
is  a  tragedy ;  he  lives  to  no  purpose  but  to  utter 
maxims,  and  dies  by  treacherous  accident,  along 
with  those  his  just  wrath  should  have  reached.  But 
he  is  generous  and  true  in  friendship,  even  while  he 
views  the  world  with  disgust,  and  longs  to  quit  the 
life  which  the  world's  distraction  has  made,  to  him, 
valueless.  Something  of  this  life  weariness  attended 
the  final  years  of  Hawthorne.  The  bloody  contest 
between  the  two  warring  halves  of  his  once-united 
land  affected  him  deeply ;  he  used  to  say,  as  Tho- 
reau  did,  that  he  could  never  be  well  while  the 
Civil  War  lasted.  His  final  illness  was  long  in 
continuance,  and  nothing  could  relieve  its  attack ; 
his  death  was  sudden  and  mysterious,  as  so  much 
of  his  life  had  been.  To  Hawthorne,  as  to  Hamlet, 
the  world  was  out  of  joint,  and  he  despaired  of  set 
ting  it  right.  Nor  did  he  ;  the  stuff  of  a  reformer 
was  not  in  him.  His  work  was  to  show  his  magic 
pictures  on  the  walls  of  our  own  life,  for  warning, 


THE  WAYSIDE  163 

for  pity,  for  entertainment ;  but  little  more  than 
that.  His  life  was  gentle,  but  pathetic  ;  so  long  in 
coming  to  his  well-earned  fame  ;  so  solitary  and 
so  forward-looking ;  and  then  a  time  comparatively 
brief  before  inscrutable  death  summoned  him  away. 

Yet  all  these  incidents  and  traits  made  him  the 
more  attractive  in  friendship.  In  that  union,  as  in 
the  kindred  passion  of  love,  pity  goes  for  much ; 
and  those  who  came  within  the  sphere  of  Hawthorne 
inevitably  felt  compassion  for  his  dark  and  secluded 
nature,  fitfully  illumined  by  flashes  of  charming 
light,  and  ennobled  by  an  elevation  of  sentiment 
that  dignified  the  plain  realities  of  his  daily  exist 
ence.  He  belonged,  visibly,  to  that  small  order  of 
superior  persons  who  stand  forth  from  the  common 
level  of  society,  simple  in  manners,  if  complex  in 
nature,  and  bearing  the  signet  of  power. 

Too  many  who  throng  as  friends  around  persons 
of  power  are  selfish  in  their  friendliness  ;  they  seek 
benefit  to  themselves  from  the  alliance  or  the  depend 
ence  in  which  they  place  themselves.  But  the  friends 
of  Hawthorne,  from  his  first  woodland  companion 
in  Raymond,  the  half-breed  William  Symmes,  who 
found  or  invented,  but  most  probably  only  garbled, 
the  boyish  diary  of  Hawthorne,  edited  some  years 
since  by  Mr.  Pickard,  to  the  ex-President,  his  com 
panion  in  that  last  journey  towards  the  mountains  of 
New  Hampshire,  were,  as  the  quaint  old  poet  said, 
"  All  for  love  and  nothing  for  reward." 


164  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

Poor  Symmes,  the  son  of  a  Maine  gentleman  and 
a  Virginia  slave,  born  a  year  after  Hawthorne,  and 
thrown  with  him  on  those  terms  of  equality  which 
prevail  among  boys,  was  his  comrade  in  fishing 
excursions  and  forest  rambles,  as  Horatio  Bridge 
was  a  few  years  later ;  and  both  found  in  him  a 
steady  and  mindful  friend.  Writing  to  Mr.  Pickard 
the  year  before  his  death,  Symmes,  then  an  old 
man,  said :  — 

"  I  have  heard  people  say  Hawthorne  was  cold 
and  distant;  if  he  was  so,  there  was  one  of  his 
youthful  associates  (as  the  world  goes,  not  his  equal 
socially,  certainly  not  intellectually)  who  was  never 
forgotten.  I  went  to  sea,  and  have  ever  since  been 
a  wanderer,  occasionally  meeting  Hawthorne  by 
chance.  Once,  after  he  graduated,  he  came  on 
board  a  vessel  in  Salem  harbor,  and  stayed  with 
me  two  hours.  I  was  then  '  before  the  mast.'  The 
last  time  I  saw  him,  we  were  in  Liverpool :  he  re 
cognized  me  across  the  street,  and  hove  me  to.  We 
had  a  long  talk,  and  he  conversed  in  that  easy, 
bewitching  style  of  which  he  was  a  perfect  master 
when  he  pleased." 

According  to  the  Georgetown  "  Courier  "  of  No 
vember,  1871,  William  Symmes,  who  professed  to 
own  a  boyish  journal  kept  by  Hawthorne  between 
June,  1816  and  sometime  in  1819,  died  in  Florida, 
October  28,  1871.  His  father,  William  Symmes 
(descended  from  a  line  of  Puritan  ministers,  one 


THE  WAYSIDE  165 

of  whom  came  to  New  England  in  1634  with  Anne 
Hutchinson,  and  was  minister  at  Charlestown,  with 
John  Harvard,  who  gave  his  name  to  the  College, 
as  his  temporary  associate,  and  died  in  1671),  was 
once  a  tutor  in  Virginia,  and  his  mother  was  an 
African.  The  child  took  his  father's  name,  and 
was  adopted  at  the  age  of  three  by  a  Maine  captain 
named  Britton,  of  a  town  near  Raymond,  where  the 
Hawthornes  and  Mannings  lived  for  years.  In  1826, 
Symmes  became  a  sailor,  and  visited  all  parts  of 
the  globe.  By  1852  he  had  reached  California, 
where  he  lived  for  eight  years,  and  there  became 
known  to  Colonel  L.  C.  Baker,  who  in  the  Civil  War 
had  the  charge  of  a  force  of  detectives  and  spies  at 
Washington.  At  that  time  he  employed  Symmes 
as  a  detective,  under  various  names,  mostly  taken 
from  rural  Maine.  He  declared  to  persons  in  and 
around  Washington  that  he  had  played  as  a  boy 
with  Senator  Fessenden  (born  in  1806)  as  well  as 
with  Hawthorne  ;  and  that  they  were  the  only  two 
white  boys  or  men  who  never,  by  word  or  look, 
offended  him  in  the  matter  of  his  color. 

Although  the  Hawthorne  Diary,  as  described  by 
Symmes,  and  partly  printed  by  Mr.  Pickard,  though 
now  suppressed,  is  doubtful  as  to  its  entire  genu 
ineness,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  Symmes 
was  Hawthorne's  companion  in  those  boyish  years, 
and  perhaps  his  earliest  friend,  outside  his  own 
family. 


166  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

With  his  college  life  a  new  era  began  in  the 
friendships  of  Hawthorne.  He  entered  Bowdoin 
College  at  the  age  of  seventeen ;  it  was  a  small 
school,  and  he  was  at  the  right  age  to  form  friend 
ships.  They  were  not  many,  it  would  seem,  but  very 
important  ones,  both  for  his  present  enjoyment  and 
the  shaping  of  his  after  life.  They  began  almost  acci 
dentally,  —  the  most  important  (that  with  Frank 
lin  Pierce,  afterwards  senator  and  President)  in  a 
stage-coach  as  he  and  Jonathan  Cilley,  afterwards 
slain  in  a  congressional  duel,  joined  Hawthorne  and 
his  first  roommate  Alfred  Mason  (a  son  of  Web 
ster's  tall  friend  Jeremiah  Mason),  then  of  Ports 
mouth,  at  that  old  seaport,  on  their  way  to  enter 
college  at  Brunswick  in  the  summer  of  1821.  All 

O 

these  youths  except  Hawthorne  were  from  New 
Hampshire :  Pierce,  a  few  months  younger  than 
Hawthorne,  was  from  Hillsboro  ;  Cilley,  two  years 
older,  from  Nottingham ;  and  Mason,  about  Haw 
thorne's  own  age,  from  Portsmouth.  Pierce,  who 
had  been  carefully  fitted  for  college,  entered  a 
year  before  the  rest,  and  through  his  course  was 
a  leader  in  the  small  student  community,  —  com 
manding  a  cadet  company  of  collegians,  of  which 
Hawthorne  was  a  private.  Cilley,  the  grandson  of 
a  distinguished  Revolutionary  general,  also  served 
in  this  company ;  but  in  his  class  was  a  leader,  from 
his  age  and  talents,  and  by  the  severer  traits  of  his 
nature,  on  which  Hawthorne  commented,  a  dozen 


THE   WAYSIDE  167 

years  after,  with  much  frankness  in  his  note-book. 
Mason  was  a  studious  youth,  as  devoted  to  science 
as  his  chum  was  to  literature  and  sauntering.  In 
the  class  he  found  his  most  world-renowned  comrade, 
Henry  Longfellow,  a  slender  youth  of  fourteen, 
who,  before  graduating  in  1825,  was  already  a  poet 
of  some  note,  and  who  became  at  one  time  the  most 
widely  read  of  all  contemporary  poets  who  wrote 
English.  Another  classmate  was  Horatio  Bridge, 
to  whom,  next  to  Pierce,  Hawthorne  was  most  at 
tached,  and  who  was  one  of  the  last  survivors  of 
that  college  class  of  thirty-eight  members.  With 
these  four  youths,  of  an  age  near  his  own,  Haw 
thorne  continued  intimate  so  long  as  he  and  they 
lived ;  and  their  friendship  was  one  of  the  chief 
delights  of  his  life  until  he  fell  in  love  with  Miss 
Sophia  Peabody,  of  a  Salem  family  living  near  his 
own,  but  with  which,  for  years,, he  had  little  com 
munication. 

The  habits  of  young  men  in  college,  fourscore  years 
ago,  were  what  is  euphoniously  termed  "  convivial;" 
the  temperance  reformation  had  not  set  in,  and 
Madeira  wine  was  still  abundant  along  the  coast 
of  New  England,  and  in  her  chief  seaports.  Con 
sequently  there  need  be  no  surprise  at  the  wager 
made  between  Cilley  and  Hawthorne  in  November, 
1824,  after  Pierce  had  left  Brunswick,  and  gone 
to  study  law  with  a  more  profound  jurist,  Wood- 
bury,  of  Portsmouth,  who  had  been  judge  and  gov- 


168  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

era  or  in  New  Hampshire.  The  papers  in  the  case 
are  singular,  and  were  lodged  in  the  hands  of  a 
classmate,  Horatio  Bridge,  of  Augusta,  the  Maine 
capital,  then  a  small  country  village.  Mr.  Bridge, 
who  became  a  naval  officer,  and  was  promoted  by 
President  Pierce,  published  them  in  1892,  and  here 
they  are.  They  show,  among  other  things,  that  Haw 
thorne  then,  as  his  mother  always  did,  signed  the 
name  "  Hathorne,"  only  choosing  the  recent  famil 
iar  form  some  years  later.  Mr.  Bridge  said  :  — 

"  Although  Hawthorne,  while  a  collegian,  rarely 
sought  or  accepted  the  acquaintance  of  young  ladies, 
he  had  a  high  appreciation  of  the  sex.  An  early 
marriage,  however,  did  not  enter  into  his  plans  of 
life.  The  evidence  of  this  fact  is  among  my  papers, 

and  runs  thus  :  — 

'  BOWDOIN  COLLEGE,  Nov.  14,  1824. 

If  Nathaniel  Hathorne  is  neither  a  married  man 
nor  a  widower  on  the  14th  day  of  November,  1836, 
I  bind  myself  upon  my  honor  to  pay  the  said  Ha 
thorne  a  barrel  of  the  best  old  Madeira  wine. 
(J.  C.)  Witness  my  hand  and  seal. 

JONATHAN  CILLEY.' 

(The  same  date).  '  If  I  am  a  married  man  or  a 
widower  on  the  14th  day  of  November,  1836, 1  bind 
myself  upon  my  honor,  to  pay  Jonathan  Ciiley  a 
barrel  of  the  best  old  Madeira  wine. 

Witness  my  hand  and  seal. 
(N.  H.)   NATHANIEL  HATHOBNE.' 


THE  WAYSIDE  169 

This  very  formal  agreement  was  inclosed  in  a 
closely  sealed  package,  indorsed  in  Hawthorne's 
writing,  thus  :  — 

" 4  Mr.  Horatio  Bridge  is  requested  to  take  charge 
of  this  paper,  and  not  to  open  it  until  the  15th  day 
of  November,  1836,  unless  by  the  joint  request  of 
Cilley  and  Hathorne.' 

"  On  the  designated  day  I  broke  the  seals,  and 
notified  Cilley  that  he  had  lost  the  wager.  He  ad 
mitted  the  loss,  and,  after  the  delay  of  a  year  or  more, 
was  making  arrangements  for  its  payment,  and  a 
meeting  to  taste  the  wine,  when  his  tragic  death, 
in  a  duel  with  Graves  of  Kentucky,  settled  the 
account." 

The  next  year  after  gaming  this  wager  (July, 
1837),  Hawthorne  went  to  Augusta  to  spend  a 
month  with  his  friend  Bridge,  and  his  note-book  in 
that  month  records  his  opinion  of  the  mature  man, 
with  whom  he  had  been  corresponding  for  years 
under  the  name  of  "  Oberon."  He,  too,  had  not  yet 
married,  and  thus  Hawthorne  describes  the  friend 
to  whom  the  world  owes  the  first  volume  of  "  The 
Twice-Told  Tales  :  "  - 

"  Bridge,  our  host,  combines  more  high  and  ad 
mirable  qualities,  of  that  sort  which  makes  up  a 
gentleman,  than  any  other  that  I  have  met  with : 
polished,  yet  natural,  frank,  open,  and  straightfor 
ward,  yet  with  a  delicate  feeling  for  the  sensitiveness 
of  his  companions  ;  of  excellent  temper  and  warm 


170  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

heart ;  well  acquainted  with  the  world ;  with  a  keen 
faculty  of  observation,  which  he  has  had  many  op 
portunities  of  exercising ;  and  never  varying  from 
a  code  of  honor  and  principle  which  is  really  nice 
and  rigid  in  its  way.  He  seems  almost  to  have  made 
up  his  mind  never  to  be  married ;  which  I  wonder 
at,  for  he  has  strong  affections,  and  is  fond  both 
of  women  and  children.  .  .  .  And  here  is  myself, 
who  am  a  queer  character  in  rny  way,  and  have 
come  to  spend  a  week  or  two  with  my  friend  of 
half  a  lifetime.  Fate  seems  to  be  preparing  changes 
for  both.  My  circumstances  cannot  long  continue 
as  they  are  and  have  been ;  and  Bridge,  too,  stands 
between  high  prosperity  and  utter  ruin." 

It  was  ruin,  of  the  financial  sort,  which  fell  on 
Bridge.  He  had  invested  largely  in  a  water-power 
enterprise  on  the  Kennebec,  —  the  building  of  a 
milldam  across  the  river,  for  mills  and  factories,  — 
which  the  faithless  stream  destroyed.  He  says :  — 

"A  freshet,  higher,  of  course,  'than  was  ever 
before  known,'  swept  away  the  dam  and  the  mills, 
cut  a  new  channel  for  the  Kennebec,  swallowed 
up  my  paternal  mansion  on  grounds  near  by,  and 
ruined  me  financially.  I  entered  the  navy  as  pay 
master,  and  after  sixteen  years'  service  was  made 
paymaster-general  by  President  Pierce,  which  office 
I  held  for  fifteen  years,  including  the  whole  period 
of  the  Civil  War." 

Before    this   visit   of   Hawthorne    at   Augusta, 


THE   WAYSIDE  171 

Bridge  had  secured  the  publication  of  "  Twice-Told 
Tales  "  in  a  volume,  by  guaranteeing  $250  to  the 
publisher  "  as  an  ultimate  resort  against  loss."  The 
edition,  which  came  out  in  1837,  was  a  thousand 
copies  ;  they  cost  the  publisher  $450  or  $500,  and 
brought  the  author  only  $100,  until  new  editions 
were  issued.  The  publication  depended  solely  upon 
Bridge's  guarantee  of  $250,  which  he  was  not  re 
quired  to  pay,  because  the  book  succeeded  ;  and  of 
it  Bridge  says  :  — 

"  Its  success  was  not  pecuniarily  great  at  first, 
—  but  in  this  country,  and  still  more  in  England, 
where  Hawthorne  was  promptly  and  highly  appre 
ciated,  the  book  established  his  right  to  a  place 
among  living  authors  of  recognized  power.  In  Oc 
tober,  1836,  I  had  written  for  the  Boston  'Post' 
this  notice  :  — 

"  '  It  is  a  singular  fact,  that,  of  the  few  American 
writers  by  profession,  one  of  the  very  best  is  a 
gentleman  whose  name  has  never  yet  been  made 
public,  though  his  writings  are  extensively  and  favor 
ably  known.  It  is  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  of  Salem, 
author  of  "  The  Gentle  Boy,"  "  The  Gray  Cham 
pion,"  etc.,  —  all  productions  of  high  merit,  which 
have  appeared  in  annuals  and  magazines  the  last 
three  or  four  years.  Liberally  educated,  but  bred  to 
no  profession,  he  has  devoted  himself  exclusively 
to  literary  pursuits,  with  an  ardor  and  success  which 
will  ere  long  give  him  a  high  place  among  the 


172  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

scholars  of  this  country.  His  style  is  classical  and 
pure,  his  imagination  exceedingly  delicate  and  fan 
ciful,  and  through  all  his  writings  there  runs  a  vein 
of  sweetest  poetry.' " 

Probably  Hawthorne's  pride  prevented  this  fore 
taste  of  his  fame  from  publication ;  so  that  Park 
Benjamin  may  have  been  the  first  publicly  to 
herald  him  as  an  author,  by  name.  But  he  was 
already  finding  in  Salem  another  pair  of  friends, 
who  were  to  influence  the  current  of  his  days  for  a 
dozen  years,  more  than  Bridge  or  Pierce.  These 
were  the  two  daughters  of  Dr.  Nathaniel  Peabody 
of  Salem,  Elizabeth  and  Sophia,  —  one  a  few 
weeks  older  than  Hawthorne,  the  other,  five  years 
younger,  and  two  years  younger  than  the  poet 
Longfellow.  They  were  descended,  on  the  mother's 
side,  from  General  Palmer  of  the  Revolution  and 
the  Boston  Langdons,  from  whom  came  President 
Langdon  of  Harvard,  and  Dr.  N.  L.  Frothingham. 
Sophia  had  been  mistakenly  treated  for  illness 
when  a  child,  and  became  a  sad  nervous  invalid, 
suffering  the  worst  of  headaches,  and  coming  at 
last  into  the  new  medical  treatment  called  homeo 
pathy,  after  having  for  four  years,  in  Boston,  the 
kind  care  of  Dr.  Walter  Channing  of  the  older 
school,  the  father  of  Ellery  Channing,  who  later 
became  an  intimate  friend  of  Hawthorne  and  his 
wife.  Moving  about  from  town  to  town,  as  the 
Hawthornes  had  done,  the  Peabody  family,  though 


THE  WAYSIDE  173 

not  themselves  recluse,  except  in  case  of  this  in 
valid  daughter,  had  never  known  the  recluse  Haw- 
thornes  until  about  1838,  though  the  children  had 
played  together  in  early  childhood.  In  that  year, 
when  the  fact  that  Hawthorne  had  written  the 
Tales  was  well  known,  he  called,  with  his  two  sis 
ters,  on  Elizabeth  Peabody  in  her  Salem  parlor, 
while  the  invalid  Sophia  was  in  her  chamber.  The 
enthusiastic  elder  sister  says  :  — 

"  As  soon  as  I  could,  I  ran  upstairs  to  her,  and 
said :  '  O  Sophia,  you  must  get  up  and  dress  and 
come  down !  The  Hawthornes  are  here,  and  you 
never  saw  anything  so  splendid  as  he  is;  he  is 
handsomer  than  Lord  Byron.'  She  laughed,  but 
refused  to  come,  remarking  that  since  he  had  called 
once,  he  would  call  again.  .  .  .  He  did  call  again, 
not  long  afterwards;  and  this  time  Sophia  came 
down  in  her  simple  white  wrapper.  As  I  said  4  My 
sister  Sophia,'  he  rose  and  looked  at  her  intently, 
—  he  did  not  realize  how  intently.  As  we  went  on 
talking,  she  would  frequently  interpose  a  remark 
in  her  sweet  low  voice.  Every  time  she  did  so  he 
would  look  at  her  again  with  the  same  piercing 
gaze.  I  was  struck  with  it,  and  thought,  4  What  if 
he  should  fall  in  love  with  her?'  The  thought 
troubled  me,  for  she  had  often  told  me  that  nothing 
would  ever  tempt  her  to  marry  and  inflict  on  a 
husband  the  care  of  an  invalid." 

The  acquaintance  thus  formed  ripened  fast,  and 


174  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

the  influence  of  the  Peabodys  and  their  circle, 
which  included  Emerson,  Alcott,  and  the  Chan- 
nings,  with  other  disciples  of  the  Newness  which 
had  been  christened  Transcendentalism,  brought 
Hawthorne  into  a  companionship  for  which  little 
in  his  past  life,  but  much  in  his  poetic  nature,  had 
fitted  him.  George  Bancroft,  then  collector  of 
Boston  under  Van  Buren's  administration,  and  a 
member  of  the  dominant  Democratic  party,  as  were 
Pierce  and  Bridge,  Cooper,  Irving,  Paulding,  and 
the  Sedg wicks,  had  an  inclination  to  Transcenden 
talism,  and  appointed  Hawthorne  to  a  minor  office 
in  the  custom  house,  which  gave  him  an  assured 
income,  and  seemed  to  promise  matrimony  in  the 
near  distance.  But  the  overthrow  of  Van  Buren 
and  the  Democrats  in  1840  destroyed  that  support, 
and  then  Hawthorne  embarked  as  a  small  capi 
talist  in  the  community  at  Brook  Farm,  —  experi 
mentally.  He  did  not  remain  there  long,  and  it 
cost  him  something  to  withdraw  his  capital ;  but 
he  was  now,  in  the  downfall  of  his  political  party, 
fairly  launched  on  the  cerulean  lake  of  Concord 
philosophy  and  poesy,  where  Sophia  Peabody  had 
been  floating  with  Alcott,  Emerson,  and  Margaret 
Fuller,  for  some  years.  In  the  early  summer  of 
1838,  after  her  friendship  with  Hawthorne  had  so 
singularly  begun,  she  wrote  in  her  journal  at  West 
Newton :  — 

"  How  natural  it  is  for  the  mind  to  generalize. 


THE   WAYSIDE  175 

It  seems  to  me  sometimes  as  if  every  material 
object  and  every  earthly  event  were  only  signs  of 
something  higher  signified.  Then  I  feel  as  if  I 
could  read  a  minute  portion  of  the  universe.  How 
everything  hurries  into  its  place,  the  moment  we 
are  high  enough  to  catch  the  central  light  !  All 
factitious  distinctions  hide  their  diminished  heads  ; 
conventionalities  disappear.  I  suppose  Mr.  Emer 
son  holds  himself  in  that  lofty  region  all  the  time. 
I  wonder  not  at  the  sublimity  of  his  aspect,  the 
solemnity  of  his  air.  I  think  Mr.  Emerson  is  the 
greatest  man  that  ever  lived ;  as  a  whole  he  is  sat 
isfactory.  Everything  has  its  due  with  him  ;  in  all 
relations  he  is  noble.  He  is  a  unit.  He  is  indeed  a 
'  Supernal  Vision.'  ...  I  have  read  Carlyle's  Mis 
cellanies  with  deep  delight.  The  complete  manner 
in  which  he  presents  a  man  is  wonderful.  He  is 
the  most  impartial  of  critics  except  Emerson.  Such 
a  reach  of  thought  produced  no  slight  stir  in  me. 
But  I  cannot  help  feeling  that  Emerson  is  diviner 
than  he.  Mr.  Emerson  is  Pure  Tone." 

This  enthusiasm  was  natural  at  the  time ;  but 
Hawthorne,  though  touched  by  it,  never  fully  shared 
it.  In  the  introduction  to  the  "  Mosses,"  he  says, 
"  I  admired  Emerson  as  a  poet  of  deep  beauty  and 
austere  tenderness,  but  sought  nothing  from  him  as 
a  philosopher  ;  "  and  he  declared,  a  few  years  later, 
that  he  needed  a  change  "after  living  for  three  years 
within  the  subtile  influence  of  an  intellect  like  Em- 


176  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

erson's,  and  indulging  fantastic  speculations,  beside 
our  fire  of  fallen  boughs,  with  Ellery  Channing." 
Indeed,  at  the  very  season  in  which  his  beloved 
was  writing  her  rhapsodies  above  quoted,  Haw 
thorne  was  arranging  to  disappear  for  some  months 
among  the  jockeys  and  tavern  idlers  and  tramps 
of  western  Massachusetts,  —  from  July  27  to  Sep 
tember  24, 1838.  Sophia  Peabody  wrote,  just  before 
this  journey :  — 

"  He  came  for  a  take-leave  call,  looking  radiant. 
He  said  he  was  not  going  to  tell  anybody  where  he 
should  be  for  the  next  three  months ;  he  thought 
he  should  change  his  name,  so  that,  if  he  died,  no 
one  would  be  able  to  find  his  gravestone.  He  should 
not  tell  even  his  mother  where  he  could  be  found, 
—  that  he  intended  neither  to  write  to  any  one,  nor 
to  be  written  to.  He  seems  determined  to  be  let 
alone.  .  .  .  Mary  asked  him  to  write  a  journal 
while  gone.  He  at  first  said  no ;  but  finally  con 
cluded  it  would  suit  well  for  hints  for  future  sto 
ries." 

Hawthorne  carried  out  this  suggestion,  and  the 
journal  of  the  next  eight  weeks  covers  nearly  eighty 
printed  pages,  and  ranges  in  its  mention  of  persons 
from  Dr.  Channing's  good  friend,  Jonathan  Phil 
lips  of  Boston,  and  the  professors  and  students  of 
Williams  and  Amherst  colleges,  to  caravan  masters 
and  showmen,  stage-drivers  and  jockeys,  essence 
peddlers  from  Ashfield,  and  the  whole  riffraff  of 


THE   WAYSIDE  177 

Berkshire  County  and  the  country  towns  of  Con 
necticut.  I  conclude  Hawthorne  was  traveling 
about  in  the  stage-coach  line  of  his  uncles,  as  a  sort 
of  inspector,  to  see  how  the  business  was  going  on ; 
but  he  was  also,  as  he  had  been  for  years,  laying 
in  a  stock  of  human  characters  and  experiences 
for  use  in  his  profession  of  author.  The  pig-drover, 
the  soap-boiler,  and  the  worn-out  village  drunkard 
were  all  fish  to  his  net. 

Thirty  months  after  this  sally  into  the  common 
place  world  of  the  Berkshire  hills  and  valleys, 
Hawthorne,  having  passed  through  the  crucible  of 
the  Boston  Custom  House  under  George  Bancroft 

O 

"  the  virtuous  Republican  "  (as  the  Beacon  Street 
Whigs  termed  him  for  his  theoretical  democracy), 
found  himself  at  Brook  Farm,  in  April,  1841,  in 
the  midst  of  practical  democrats,  living  in  equality, 
and  all  working  with  their  hands.  He  soon  made 
the  historic  attempt  to  milk  Margaret  Fuller's 
"  transcendental  heifer,"  but  found  her  "  very 
fractious,  and  apt  to  kick  over  the  milk-pail."  He 
complains  in  his  journal  that  "  she  hooks  the  other 
cows,  and  has  made  herself  ruler  of  the  herd,  in  a 
very  tyrannical  manner."  But  she  took  a  fancy  to 
Hawthorne,  as  persons  of  her  sex  were  quite  likely 
to  do,  and  he  seems  to  get  her  somehow  confounded 
with  Miss  Fuller  herself,  towards  whom  Hawthorne 
felt  no  attraction.  He  says  of  the  heifer,  "  She  is 
not  amiable,  but  has  a  very  intelligent  face,  and 


178  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

seems  to  be  of  a  reflective  cast  of  character."  Ef 
fusive  as  Sophia  Peabody's  enthusiasms  were,  they 
affected  Hawthorne  considerably,  in  spite  of  the 
"  reflective  cast "  of  his  own  character.  But  others 
of  the  Newness  went  far  beyond  his  future  wife  in 
the  upward  soaring  of  their  figurative  language. 
One  of  these  was  Charles  Newcomb  of  Providence 
and  Brook  Farm,  a  friend  of  Hawthorne  there,  and 
one  of  the  many  friends  and  admirers  of  Caroline 
Sturgis,  the  lady  who,  as  Mrs.  Tappan,  afterwards 
had  Hawthorne  for  her  tenant  in  the  small  red  cot 
tage  at  Lenox.  A  letter  from  Newcomb  to  Caroline, 
written  while  Hawthorne  was  at  Brook  Farm,  has 
long  been  in  my  possession,  and  I  will  quote  it  en 
tire,  as  indicating  the  zenith  to  which  the  rhetoric 
of  the  earlier  Transcendentalists  could  soar,  when 
communing  with  each  other.  In  transmitting  it  to 
Ellery  Channing,  who  gave  it  to  me,  Miss  Sturgis 
had  written,  on  the  only  blank  space  of  the  well- 
filled  sheet,  this  character-sketch  of  the  writer :  — 

A  More  Careful  Analysis 

"  No  poetry,  —  rhythm  unknown.  The  genius 
mystical,  not  creative.  The  person  too  light  for 
the  thought  ;  he  can  never  foretell  his  imagery. 
It  follows  his  thought,  and  becomes  painful.  No 
seizure  of  his  thought;  it  is  worked  out.  His 
name  unrecorded  will  die." 

No,  dear  Sibyl,  not  wholly,  if  this  record  can  for 
a  moment  recall  it  to  the  prosaic  Present  !  Here 
is  the  Epistle  :  — 


THE  WAYSIDE  179 

Charles  to  Caroline 

PROVIDENCE,  Nov.  2,  1841. 

The  moon  has  again  got  into  bright  silver  canoe, 
and  pushed  from  the  serene  sun -land  into  the 
ocean  of  the  air  :  I  first  saw  her  an  evening  or  two 
ago,  but  turned  toward  the  heaven-shore,  as  if 
human,  and  congenially  there ;  partly  drawn,  partly 
voluntarily,  —  the  state  one  is  in  when  leaving  a 
glory  and  beauty ;  when  the  humanity  of  the  soul 
gently  and  with  fullness  rises  from  its  rest  in  the 
arms  of  their  Genii,  and  with  full  eye  and  a  heav 
ing  sigh-earthen  heart  looks  up,  and  in  that  looking 
sees,  as  if  the  eyes  were  uncovered,  not  opened  to 
see ;  and  with  heroic-tender  aspiration  goes  its  way 
worldward  to  the  council  and  camps  of  the  Men- 
Gods.  When  I  saw  her,  after  a  momentary  inward 
absence  of  mind,  something,  —  perhaps  the  fresh 
living  murmur  of  human  life  around,  recalling  to 
their  actual,  and  my  human  soul  receiving  their 
softest,  religiousest,  and  humanest  impulses,  — 
brought  before  me  the  old  superstition  of  wishing 
over  the  right  shoulder ;  and  I  fell  on  my  knees, 
and  in  my  being  devoutly  expressed  faith  and  as 
piration  for  life,  —  the  word  of  all  others  expressive 
to  me  of  what  I  feel  and  want ;  uniting  faith  with 
hope,  yearning  half -desires  with  full  joy ;  life  as 
eternal  truth,  goodness,  greatness,  wholeness. 

Dear  Caroline,  how  deep  and  fresh  is  humanity ! 
I  sometimes  feel  as  if  I  could  even  cherish  it ;  that 
we  are  blind  and  ungenial  when  we  overlook  it  and 
despise  it,  and  are  annoyed  by  it  in  those  around 
us  ;  that  it  will  not  last  long  ;  only  the  gods  are 
immortal ;  children  rapidly  grow  up  to  menhood, 
men  will  be  perfect  and  omniscient  and  faultless 


180       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

enough  in  time.  May  there  be  some  great  Genius 
before  the  world  is  lost,  who  will  profoundly  repro 
duce  humanity  for  us  to  read  in  our  Olympian 
palaces  when  we  are  Gods.  How  little  do  men 
know  themselves !  The  mass  ridicule  the  pietist 
and  transcendentalist,  unconscious  that  itself  holds 
u  superstitions  "  which  have  great  power  over  their 
humanity ;  and  that  it  constantly  acts  and  illus 
trates  the  metaphysics  which  they  parodise ;  and 
in  their  deeper,  inwarder  moods  how  are  we  all 
alike !  How  they  must  move  and  please  the  hearts 
of  Angels ! 

Look  out  for  the  moon,  Caroline ;  the  surge  is 
wafting  her  gently  already.  She  is  coming  on 
through  the  starry  islands  of  the  night-sea :  cover 
ing  them  with  the  halo  of  her  brightness  and  soft 
ness,  as  the  sunset  sky  mantles  the  water  like  it 
self,  and  the  boat  expands  itself  over  the  sunset 
stream  at  its  side.  How  this  earth  must  look  to 
her  !  like  some  chaotic  embryo  of  a  heaven,  some 
kind  of  shadowy  old  ghost  of  Elysium.  Since  I 
have  seen  her  in  her  heaven-reflecting  boat,  I  have 
been  blessed  with  much;  and  the  song  prayer 
which  I  made  before  her,  that  in  the  inspiration 
and  stillness  of  her  presence  I  might  hear  the  voice 
of  one  who  had  been  with  her,  and  had  looked  on 
her  as  I  had,  —  has  been  fulfilled. 

Winter  is  rising  in  good  earnest,  like  Angelo's 
Day.  Gentle,  genial-hearted  Summer  has  gone 
within  from  the  woods  and  fields ;  and  we  children 
are  hardly  manly  (if  old)  enough  to  be  with  the 
brother  as  we  were  with  the  sister.  He  will  act 
towards  us  hero-wise  indeed  ;  but  does  not,  like 
Summer,  keep  hold  of  our  hands  and  sit  down  with 
and  by  us,  and  Mother-like,  have  us  around  him, 


THE  WAYSIDE  181 

and  bend  over  us  as  she  does,  —  her  warm  breath 
softly  falling  on  our  faces.  If  we  keep  with  him, 
we  must  take  care  of  ourselves,  and  be  pleased  with 
vigorous,  active  action.  He  has  bold  work  to  do. 
Summer  has  been  out,  and  gone  within  ;  and  Win 
ter  comes  out  to  perfect  and  use  her  work,  and  to 
do  his  own.  So  the  fisherman  goes  out  in  the  chilly 
autumn  evening,  after  the  fishing  pleasure  excur 
sion  has  returned  and  retired ;  and  he  wades  into 
the  cold  water  to  push  the  boat  ashore  and  moor 
it,  and  see  to  the  fish.  All  the  playful,  curious 
urchins  who  had  been  around  all  day  to  see  the 
party  set  off  and  return,  have  gone  home  to  supper 
and  bed;  and  the  hardy  fisherman  is  alone,  like 
Winter. 

Summer  makes  a  rich  gala  for  us  just  as  she 
leaves,  —  it  is  over,  and  we  are  retired.  Vespers 
are  over,  and  the  rich,  chanting  procession  has  gone : 
the  great  Cathedral  in  the  dim  light  is  quiet  and 
nobler  and  spiritualer  than  before.  One  living 
form  is  silently  kneeling  before  the  altar,  which, 
with  its  cherubs  overshadowing  it  with  their  wings, 
is  before  him  like  a  rock  on  which  winged  angels 
have  alighted,  in  the  darkness  and  silence,  before 
the  Monk  engaged  in  a  life  developed  and  fully 
revealed  by  the  previous  blessed  service.  The  soul- 
deep  devotion  opened  his  soul  before  the  Eternal, 
and  face  to  face  are  they  :  and  life  and  light  will 
be  in  him  when  the  humanity  comes  between  them, 
and  the  Divinity  goes  in  the  Cloud  as  insensibly 
as  the  twilight  comes.  Deep  workings  were  going 
on  even  while  they  faced  ;  and  the  sphere  of  Im 
mortality,  which  knows  (neither)  night  nor  day, 
work  nor  rest,  is  still  around  him  ;  and  the  soul  is 
alive  in  it,  and  mortality  reflects  divinity. 


182  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

Fanny  Ellsler  danced  here  last  Friday,  and  bet 
ter  than  ever.  I  hope  you  saw  her.  What  shall 
we  say  to  each  other  about  her  ? 

What  letters  we  write!  and  yet  they  are  real 
letters,  for  they  are  genuine  and  un-letterical,  and 
we  speak  as  we  feel.  It  is  something  like  sing 
ing  together,  —  a  kind  of  recitative,  in  which  is 
much  expression,  —  a  relation  towards  the  divine, 
and  each  other  too.  After  all,  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  abstractedness;  Nature  is  ever  true  to 
itself. 

I  read  Manzoni  with  much  simple  pleasure  some 
time  ago,  when  Miss  Fuller  was  living  here.  If  I 
could  get  it  (the  translation)  I  would  like  to  read 
it  again,  and  feel  like  it  now.  I  like  those  reposing 
details,  and  Manzoni's  pure,  healthful  spirit,  —  the 
genuineness  and  simplicity  of  his  matter-of-factness. 

Write  soon,  —  if  you  want  to.  How  we  have  to 
qualify  our  expressions !  it  shows  how  false  has 
been  the  relation  of  men  hitherto ;  or  perhaps  how 
imperfect  is  language.  But  the  inference  is  the 
same  as  if  the  other  was  the  cause. 

*  Your  friend, 

C.  K.  N. 


Miss  C.  STUBGIS,  Care  of  Capt.  Wm.  Sturgis,  Boston. 

This  unexampled  letter,  dated  the  2d  of  Novem 
ber,  was  not  posted  in  Providence  till  the  23d ;  and 
in  the  interval  the  Moon  had  been  navigating,  and 
Summer  going  indoors,  and  the  urchins  going  to 
supper,  and  the  lone  fisherman  carrying  home  his 
catch.  What  a  medley,  and  what  a  style !  senti 
ment  and  thought  glimmering  through  a  lace  veil 


THE  WAYSIDE  183 

of  words  and  punctuation  most  characteristic  of 
the  period. 

During  his  engagement  to  Miss  Peabody,  and 
before  his  marriage,  Hawthorne  seems  to  have  be 
come  acquainted  with  Ellery  Channing,  —  perhaps 
even  before  Channing  personally  met  Emerson,  in 
December,  1840.  They  met  once  at  Brook  Farm, 
and  by  April,  1843,  after  Channing's  own  marriage, 
were  so  good  comrades  that  Channing,  writing  to 
Emerson  in  his  humorous  vein,  and  disparaging 
the  vegetarian  theories  of  Bronson  Alcott,  and  his 
English  friends,  Charles  Lane  and  Henry  Wright, 
who  had  lately  come  across  the  ocean  to  help  sow 
their  transcendental  wild  oats  at  Fruitlands  in 
Harvard,  —  this  eccentric  poet,  I  say,  thus  rambled 
on  (April  6,  1843)  :  — 

"  Alas  for  the  unleavened  bread !  alas  for  the 
unleavened  wit !  I  relish  that  Yankee  theorem,  — 
4  Eat  your  victuals  and  go  about  your  business  ! ' 
A  magazine  written  by  professed  drunkards,  — 
gentlemen  who  eat  nothing  but  beefsteaks,  and 
believers  in  Original  Sin,  must  be  the  thing  for  me. 
What  has  transpired  with  the  magazine  papering 
Hawthorne  ?  Has  he  too  been  floated  by  this  great 
rise  of  English  wit?  forsworn  whiskey,  abandoned 
tobacco,  and  rejected  fishing  ?  No,  by  the  immortal 
gods  I  swear  that  Hawthorne  sticks  like  court- 
plaister  to  all  the  old  sinful  nonsense,  —  to  strong 
drinks  and  strong  meats,  and,  above  all,  to  the 


184  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

gentle  art  of  angling,  a  true  disciple  of  pimple- 
cheeked  Walton.  Oh,  never  may  that  day  of  horrors 
come,  when  the  Twice-Told  Tales  of  love  and  malice 
shall  be  fused  in  the  grim  Behmenic  melting-pot ! 
Eather  let  the  ingenious  Hawthorne,  demented, 
wander  over  the  ascetic  Styx,  tiger  or  wherryman 
to  Charon !  let  him  beard  the  Minos  in  his  den,  — 
do  anything  before  he  sells  himself  body  and  soul 
for  twelve  volumes  of  the  Greaves  MSS.,  or  some 
book  of  metaphysical  stuff,  fit  only  to  be  sold  at 
the  shops  of  second-hand  booksellers,  or  enjoy  their 
existence  as  wrapping  literature!  I  fancy  I  see 
Hawthorne  now,  throwing  his  cork,  —  kinglike, 
ruler  of  the  shades  below  water." 

In  these  aquatic  sports,  which  demanded  some 
thing  stronger  than  water  inside  the  angler,  Chan- 
ning  was  for  years  the  companion  of  Hawthorne, 
on  Concord  River  and  by  the  seaside,  or  wherever 
the  novelist  went  to  fish.  Hawthorne  celebrated 
their  comradeship  in  his  "  Mosses,"  saying  :  — 

"  It  might  be  that  Ellery  Channing  came  up  the 
avenue,  to  join  me  in  a  fishing  excursion  on  the 
river.  Strange  and  happy  times  were  these,  when 
we  cast  aside  all  irksome  forms  and  strait-laced 
habitudes,  and  delivered  ourselves  up  to  the  free 
air,  to  live  like  the  Indians,  or  any  less  conventional 
race,  during  one  bright  semicircle  of  the  sun.  Had 
the  Assabet  been  a  thought  more  wild,  I  could  have 
fancied  that  this  river  had  strayed  forth  out  of  the 


THE  WAYSIDE  185 

ricli  scenery  of  my  companion's  inner  world ;  only 
the  vegetation  along  its  banks  should  then  have  had 
an  oriental  character.  .  .  .  Our  fire,  red  gleaming 
among  the  trees,  and  we  beside  it,  busied  with  cul 
inary  rites,  and  spreading  out  our  meal  on  a  moss- 
grown  log,  all  seemed  in  unison  with  the  river 
gliding  by,  and  the  foliage  rustling  over  us.  It  was 
the  very  spot  in  which  to  utter  the  extremest  non 
sense  or  the  profoundest  wisdom,  —  or  that  ethereal 
product  of  the  mind  which  partakes  of  both.  So, 
amid  sunshine  and  shadow,  rustling  leaves  and 
sighing  waters,  up  gushed  our  talk  like  the  babble 
of  a  fountain.  The  evanescent  spray  was  Ellery's, 
and  his,  too,  the  lumps  of  golden  thought  that  lay 
glimmering  in  the  fountain's  bed,  and  brightened 
both  our  faces  by  the  reflection.  Could  he  have 
drawn  out  that  virgin  gold,  and  stamped  it  with  the 
mint  mark  which  alone  gives  currency,  the  world 
might  have  had  the  profit,  and  he  the  fame.  My 
mind  was  the  richer  merely  by  the  knowledge  that 
it  was  there." 

At  this  time  Hawthorne  was  approaching  forty, 
and  Channing  was  but  twenty -five.  Their  intimacy 
continued  till  Hawthorne's  death  in  1864,  —  more 
than  twenty  years,  that  is ;  and,  like  Channing's 
friendship  with  Thoreau,  it  was  more  complete  than 
most  of  Hawthorne's  earlier  or  later  friendships 
could  be.  They  came  together  at  the  psychologic 
moment ;  their  natures  were  akin,  and  the  free  life 


186       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

they  enjoyed  with  each  other  was  a  relief  from  the 
bondage  of  social  custom,  which  both  disliked,  and 
renounced  when  they  could.  Both  were  poets  by 
nature,  and  took  a  poetic  view  of  the  persons  they 
fancied,  —  with  a  humorous  glance  at  the  mass  of 
men  and  women  they  did  not  fancy,  but  were  able 
to  tolerate  and  to  aid,  when  it  came  in  their  way. 
Altruism,  as  we  have  learned  to  call  the  mood  of 
the  greatest  souls,  was  not  their  specialty ;  yet  they 
had  it  in  abundance,  when  the  conscience  or  the 
whim  of  the  moment  did  not  interpose.  Twice  in 
verse,  and  often  to  me  in  prose,  did  Channing  con 
vey  his  picture  of  Hawthorne  ;  here  is  one  of  them, 
under  the  poetic  name  of  "  Count  Julian  "  :  — 

As  in  some  stately  grove  of  singing  pines 
One  tree,  more  marked  than  all,  decisive  rears 
Its  grand,  aspiring  figure  to  the  sky,  — 
Remote  from  those  beneath,  —  and  o'er  whose  top 
The  first  faint  light  of  dawn  familiar  plays; 
So  in  Count  Julian's  face  there  was  the  soul 
Of  something  deeper  than  the  general  heart,  — 
Some  memory  more  near  to  other  worlds, 
Time's  recollection,  and  the  storied  Past. 

His  pure,  slight  form  had  a  true  Grecian  charm, 

Soft  as  the  willow  o'er  the  river  swaying, 

Yet  sinewy,  and  capable  of  action; 

Such  grace  as  in  Apollo's  figure  lay 

When  he  was  moving  the  still  world  with  light. 

About  his  forehead  clustered  rich  black  curls, 

Medusa-like;  they  charmed  the  Student's  eye. 


THE  WAYSIDE  187 

Those  soft,  still  hazel  orbs  Count  Julian  had 
Looked  dream-like  forth  on  the  familiar  day,  — 
Yet  eloquent,  and  full  of  luminous  force 
Sweetly  humane,  —  that  had  no  harshness  known; 
Unbroken  eyes,  where  love  forever  dwelt. 
This  art  of  Nature  which  surrounded  him, 
This  made  Count  Julian  what  he  was  to  me, — 
Which  neither  time  nor  place,  nor  poet's  pen, 
Nor  sculptor's  chisel,  e'er  can  mould  again. 

This  indescribable  something  in  Hawthorne's 
aspect  and  nature,  indicating  depths  which  he 
could  not  otherwise  express,  either  with  faltering 
tongue  or  artistic  pen,  —  this  air  of  distinction  and 
mystery,  always  attractive  to  women  and  to  poets, 
drew  Emerson  into  relations  with  Hawthorne  that 
were  always  friendly,  if  never  exactly  intimate. 
Politically,  their  opinions  might  be  far  asunder, 
but  socially  and  philosophically  they  were  much 
nearer  together.  Both  had  come  forth  unscathed 
from  the  hard  machine-shop  of  New  England  Cal 
vinism,  of  which  Hawthorne  saw  more  of  the  dark 
side,  and  Emerson  of  the  brighter.  Soon  after  re 
ceiving  Channing's  humorous  letter  of  April,  1843, 
Emerson  sat  down  to  write  a  long  epistle  to  his 
young  friend  Wheeler  of  Lincoln,  in  Germany, 
and  gave  him  the  current  news  of  the  Concord 
authors,  Hawthorne,  Alcott,  Thoreau,  and  Chan- 
ning.  Of  Hawthorne  he  said :  — 

"  Nature  is  resolved  to  make  a  stand  against  the 
Market,  which  has  grown  so  usurping  and  omni- 


188       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

potent.  Everything  shall  not  go  to  market ;  so 
Nature  makes  shy  men,  cloistered  maids,  and  angels 
in  lonely  places.  Brook  Farm  is  an  experiment 
of  another  kind,  where  everything  private  is  pub 
lished,  and  carried  to  its  extreme.  A  great  deal 
of  action  and  courage  has  been  shown  there  ;  and 
my  friend  Hawthorne  almost  regrets  he  had  not 
remained,  to  see  the  unfolding  and  issue  of  so  much 
bold  life.  He  should  have  stayed  to  be  its  historian. 
He  remains  in  his  seat  here  (the  Old  Manse),  and 
writes  very  actively  for  all  the  magazines." 

Six  weeks  later  (June  7),  Emerson  wrote  to 
Thoreau  at  Staten  Island,  "  Hawthorne  walked 
with  me  yesterday  afternoon,  and  not  until  after 
our  return  did  I  read  his  '  Celestial  Railroad,' 
which  has  a  serene  strength  we  cannot  afford  not 
to  praise,  in  this  low  life.  I  have  letters  from  Miss 
Fuller  at  Niagara." 

It  was  at  Emerson's  house,  in  the  summer  of 
1860,  that  I  first  met  Hawthorne;  a  strawberry 
party  given  in  honor  of  his  return  from  England 
and  Italy.  There  had  been  earlier  meetings  of  the 
two  men  there,  along  with  Alcott  and  Thoreau,  one 
of  which  George  Curtis  humorously  depicted  in 
his  essay  on  Concord  in  the  "  Homes  of  American 
Authors,"  thus :  — 

"  Towards  the  end  of  the  autumn  of  1845,  Mr. 
Emerson  suggested  that  a  circle  of  persons  resi 
dent  in  Concord,  of  various  ages,  and  differing  in 


THE  WAYSIDE  189 

everything  but  sympathies,  should  meet  every  Mon 
day  evening  through  the  winter  in  his  library. 
Hawthorne,  who  then  occupied  the  Old  Manse ; 
the  inflexible  Thoreau,  then  living  among  the 
blackberry  pastures  of  Walden  Pond  ;  Alcott,  then 
sublimely  meditating  impossible  summer-houses,  in 
a  little  house  on  the  Boston  Road  [this  very  Way 
side  in  its  second  entelechy,  half  a  dozen  years  be 
fore  Hawthorne  purchased  it]  ;  George  Bradford, 
then  an  inmate  of  Emerson's  house,  who  added  the 
genial  cultivation  of  the  scholar  to  the  amenities  of 
the  natural  gentleman ;  a  sturdy  farmer  neighbor, 
Edmund  Hosmer;  two  city  youths,  George  and 
Burrill  Curtis,  and  the  host  himself  composed  the 
club.  Ellery  Channing,  who  had  that  winter  har 
nessed  his  Pegasus  to  the  New  York  "  Tribune," 
was  a  kind  of  corresponding  member.  It  was  a 
congress  of  oracles  on  the  one  hand,  and  of  curious 
listeners  on  the  other.  But  the  conversation  be 
came  more  and  more  staccato.  Hawthorne,  a  statue 
of  night  and  silence,  sat  a  little  removed,  under  a 
portrait  of  Dante,  gazing  imperturbably  upon  the 
group ;  and  as  he  sat  in  the  shadow,  his  dark  hair 
and  eyes,  and  suit  of  sables,  made  him  the  black 
thread  of  mystery  which  he  weaves  into  his  stories : 
while  the  shifting  presence  of  the  Brook  Farmer 
(Bradford)  played  like  heat  lightning  around  the 
room.  Alcott  was  perpetually  putting  apples  of 
gold  in  pictures  of  silver,  —  for  such  was  the  rich 


190       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

ore  of  his  thought,  coined  by  the  deep  melody  of 
his  voice.  Thoreau  charmed  us  with  the  secrets 
won  from  his  interviews  with  Pan  in  the  Walden 
Woods,  —  while  Emerson  sought  to  bind  the  wide- 
flying  embroidery  of  discourse  into  a  web  of  clear 
good  sense." 

I  have  shortened  this  description  a  little,  and  in 
serted  the  actual  names ;  for  all  these  persons  were 
known  to  me  later.  The  time  was  two  years  later 
than  the  letter  of  Emerson  last  quoted ;  but  here  is 
what  Hawthorne  himself  said  of  Alcott,  afterwards 
his  next-door  neighbor,  the  first  winter  of  his  resi 
dence  in  the  Old  Manse.  I  take  it  from  the  first 
form  of  the  "Hall  of  Fantasy,"  originally  published 
in  Lowell's  short-lived  Cambridge  magazine,  the 
"  Pioneer,"  and  there  containing  many  more  names 
of  living  persons  than  afterwards  came  out  in  its 
abridged  form  in  the  "  Mosses."  To  show  how 
Hawthorne  then  viewed  his  contemporaries,  I  will 
quote  the  omitted  touches :  — 

"  There  was  a  dear  friend  of  mine  among  the 
noted  reformers  of  the  day,  who  has  striven  with 
all  his  might  to  wash  away  the  blood  stain  from 
the  statute  book ;  and  no  philanthropist  need  blush 
to  stand  on  the  same  footing  with  O' Sullivan.  It 
gladdened  me  to  greet  my  old  friends  of  Brook 
Farm,  with  whom,  though  a  recreant  now,  I  had 
borne  the  heat  of  many  a  summer's  day,  while  we 
labored  together  towards  the  perfect  life.  Mr. 


THE  WAYSIDE  191 

Emerson  was  likewise  there,  leaning  against  one 
of  the  pillars,  and  surrounded  by  an  admiring 
crowd  of  writers  and  readers  of  the  '  Dial.'  He 
had  come  into  the  hall,  I  suppose,  in  search  either 
of  a  fact  or  a  real  man,  both  of  which  he  was  as 
likely  to  find  there  as  elsewhere.  No  more  earnest 
seeker  after  truth  than  he,  and  few  more  success 
ful  finders  of  it ;  although  sometimes  the  truth 
assumes  a  mystic  unreality  and  shadowness  in  his 
grasp.  In  the  same  part  of  the  hall  Jones  Very 
stood  alone,  within  a  circle  which  no  other  of 
mortal  race  could  enter,  nor  himself  escape  from. 

"  Here  also  was  Mr.  Alcott,  with  two  or  three 
friends  [the  Englishmen  above  mentioned]  whom 
his  spirit  had  assimilated  to  itself,  and  drawn  to 
his  New  England  home,  though  an  ocean  rolled 
between.  There  was  no  man  in  the  enchanted  hall 
whose  mere  presence,  the  language  of  whose  look 
and  manner,  wrought  such  an  impression  as  that 
of  this  great  mystic  innovator.  So  calm  and  gentle 
was  he,  so  quiet  in  the  utterance  of  what  his  soul 
brooded  upon,  that  one  might  readily  conceive  his 
Orphic  Sayings  to  well  up  from  a  fountain  in  his 
breast,  which  communicated  with  the  infinite  abyss 
of  Thought.  .  .  .  Doubtless  there  is  the  spirit  of 
a  system  in  him,  but  not  the  body  of  it.  I  love  to 
contrast  him  with  that  acute  and  powerful  Intellect 
who  stands  not  far  off  [O.  A.  Brownson]. 

"  Here  were  men  whose  faith  had  embodied  itself 


192  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

in  the  form  of  a  potato,  and  others  whose  long 
beards  had  a  deep  spiritual  significance.  Here  was 
the  abolitionist,  brandishing  his  one  idea  like  an 
iron  flail.  In  a  word,  there  were  a  thousand  shapes 
of  good  and  evil,  faith  and  infidelity,  wisdom  and 
nonsense, — a  most  incongruous  throng,  among 
whom  I  must  not  forget  to  mention  Mrs.  Abigail 
Folsom,  though  by  no  means  as  a  type  of  the  whole. 

"  One  or  two  perhaps  (of  the  poets}  stole  a 
glance  at  the  bystanders,  to  watch  if  their  poetic 
absorption  were  observed.  Others  stood  talking  in 
groups,  with  a  liveliness  of  expression,  a  ready 
smile,  and  a  light,  intellectual  laughter,  which 
showed  how  rapidly  the  shafts  of  wit  were  glancing 
to  and  fro  among  them.  In  the  most  vivacious  of 
these  I  recognized  Holmes." 

These  personalities  were  omitted  in  the  "  Mosses," 
from  a  wish  to  present  his  picture  more  ideally; 
but  what  could  be  more  ideal  than  these  slight 
sketches?  In  a  ruder  manner,  the  late  Henry 
James,  a  humorous  rhetorician,  over-frank  in  his 
besprinkling  of  adjectives,  which  sometimes  escaped 
his  syringe  at  random,  and  hit  no  mark,  twenty 
years  later  sketched,  in  a  letter  to  Emerson,  Haw 
thorne  at  the  Boston  Saturday  Club,  —  a  Hall  of 
Fantasy  for  the  aged  I  may  term  it,  —  which  is 
already  quoted,  as  some  of  my  other  citations  were, 
in  my  "  Memoir  of  Bronson  Alcott,"  published  by 
Little,  Brown  and  Company.  Mr.  James  said :  — 


THE  WAYSIDE  193 

"  I  cannot  forbear  to  say  a  word  I  want  to  say 
about  Hawthorne  and  Ellery  Channing.  Hawthorne 
is  n't  a  handsome  man,  nor  an  engaging  one,  per 
sonally."  [He  was  eminently  handsome,  and  if  not 
"  engaging,"  yet  most  interesting.]  "  He  has  the 
look,  all  the  time,  to  one  who  does  n't  know  him,  of 
a  rogue  who  suddenly  finds  himself  in  a  company 
of  detectives.  But,  in  spite  of  his  rusticity,  I  felt 
a  sympathy  for  him,  amounting  to  anguish,  and 
could  n't  take  my  eyes  off  him  all  the  (Saturday 
Club)  dinner,  nor  my  rapt  attention,  as  that  inde 
cisive  little  X.  Y.  found,  I  am  afraid,  to  his  cost ; 
for  I  hardly  heard  a  word  of  what  he  kept  on 
saying  to  me,  and  felt  at  one  time  very  much  like 
sending  down  to  Parker  to  have  him  removed  from 
the  room,  as  maliciously  putting  his  little  artificial 
person  between  me  and  a  profitable  object  of  my 
study.  Yet  I  feel  now  no  ill-will  to  X.  Y.,  and  could 
recommend  any  one  (but  myself)  to  go  and  hear  him 
preach.  Hawthorne,  however,  seemed  to  me  to  pos 
sess  human  substance,  and  not  to  have  dissipated 
it  all  away,  as  the  good,  inoffensive,  comforting 
Longfellow.  He  seemed  much  nearer  the  human 
being  than  any  one  at  that  end  of  the  table,  much 
nearer.  John  Forbes  and  yourself  kept  up  the  bal 
ance  at  the  other  end ;  but  ours  was  a  desert,  with 
Hawthorne  for  its  only  oasis.  It  was  so  pathetic  to 
see  him, — contented,  sprawling  Concord  owl  that  he 
was,  and  always  has  been,  —  brought  into  the  bril- 


194  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

liant  daylight,  and  expected  to  wink  and  be  lively, 
like  any  little  dapper  Tommy  Titmouse  or  Jenny 
Wren.  How  he  buried  his  eyes  in  his  plate,  and  ate 
with  a  voracity !  that  no  one  should  dare  to  ask  him 
a  question. 

"  The  idea  I  got  was,  and  it  was  very  powerfully 
impressed  on  me,  that  we  are  all  monstrously  cor 
rupt,  hopelessly  bereft  of  human  consciousness ;  and 
that  it  is  the  intention  of  Divine  providence  to  over 
run  us,  and  obliterate  us  in  a  new  Gothic  and 
Vandalic  invasion ;  of  which  this  Concord  specimen 
is  a  first  fruit.  It  was  heavenly  to  see  him  persist 
in  ignoring  X.  Y.,  and  shutting  his  eyes  against  his 
spectral  smiles ;  eating  his  dinner,  and  doing  abso 
lutely  nothing  but  that ;  and  then  going  home  to  his 
Concord  den,  to  fall  on  his  knees  and  ask  his  Hea 
venly  Father  why  it  was  that  an  owl  could  n't  remain 
an  owl,  and  not  be  forced  into  the  diversions  of  a 
canary.  I  have  no  doubt  that  all  the  tenderest  an 
gels  saw  to  his  case  that  night,  and  poured  oil  into 
his  wounds,  more  soothing  than  gentlemen  ever 
know. 

"Ellery  Channing,  too,  seemed  so  human  and 
good,  sweet  as  sunshine,  and  fragrant  as  pine  woods. 
He  is  more  sophisticated  than  the  other,  of  course, 
but  still  he  was  kin ;  and  I  felt  the  world  richer 
by  two  men,  who  had  not  yet  lost  themselves  in 
mere  members  of  society.  The  old  world  is  break 
ing  up  on  all  hands ;  the  glimpse  of  the  everlasting 


THE  WAYSIDE  195 

granite  I  got  in  Hawthorne  shows  me  that  there  is 
stock  enough  for  fifty  better.  Let  the  old  impostor 
go,  bag  and  baggage  ;  for  a  very  real  and  sub 
stantial  one  is  aching  to  come  on,  in  which  the 
churl  shall  not  be  exalted  to  a  place  of  dignity, 
in  which  innocence  shall  never  be  tarnished  nor 
trafficked  in,  in  which  every  man's  freedom  shall 
be  respected." 

(Such  is  the  new  Heavens  and  the  new  Earth, 
as  I  understand  it,  that  the  avoirdupois  of  Secretary 
Taft  has  introduced  in  the  Philippines.) 

This  flight  of  fancy  must  not  be  taken  too  liter 
ally  ;  but  it  points  to  a  wide  separation  between  men 
of  high  and  deep  imagination,  like  Hawthorne  and 
Chanuing  (and  Thoreau  would  have  made  a  third), 
and  men  of  the  Boston  and  Cambridge  culture,  like 
most  of  those  at  this  Club.  Men  and  women  of 
quick  perceptions  will  vary  in  their  expression  of 
the  point  and  degree  of  departure  with  Hawthorne 
from  the  conventional  standard  ;  but  every  one  per 
ceives  it.  Alcott,  whom  Hawthorne  so  felicitously 
depicted,  as  I  cited  just  now,  had  the  insight  to 
fathom  his  neighbor,  and  has  drawn  his  picture  with 
a  few  strokes,  in  that  masterly  series  of  portrait 
sonnets  which  he  wrote  after  the  age  of  eighty, 
prefixing  to  each  one  a  motto  that  prefigured,  sym 
bolically,  the  friend  depicted. 

Alcott's  explanation  of  the  enigma  of  Hawthorne, 
the  chronicler  of  human  imperfection  and  purga- 


196  HAWTHORNE    CENTENARY 

tion,  —  a  New  England  Dante,  —  may  pass  for  what 
it  is,  —  a  poet's  suggestion,  vaguely  illumining  what 
none  of  us  see  quite  clearly.  Hawthorne's  best 
friends  were  among  the  poets,  and  those  frustrated 
poets,  the  idealists,  men  or  women,  with  whom  he 
had  deep  sympathies,  and  who  felt  his  inexplicable 
power.  But  he  had  many  practical  friends,  who  had 
small  knowledge  of  his  ideal  nature,  but  loved  him 
and  sought  to  give  him  that  station  in  the  world 
which  his  genius  required  to  keep  its  light  burning. 

"  To  keep  the  lamp  alive, 
With  oil  we  fill  the  bowl," 

says  the  quaint  hymn ;  and  Bridge  and  O'Sullivan, 
Atherton  and  Pierce,  with  other  political  and  social 
companions,  not  all  of  the  choicest,  but  held  by 
Hawthorne  as  comrades  of  his  lighter  hours,  did 
much  for  his  maintenance  and  encouragement  dur 
ing  the  weary  years  when  his  genius  failed  of  just 
appreciation.  We  may  honor  them  for  this,  and 
not  dwell  too  censoriously  on  their  opinions  or  habits. 
Like  Hamlet,  and  like  a  later  and  gayer  prince  Hal, 
Hawthorne  had  associates  for  Saturdays  as  well  as 
for  Sundays ;  they  loved  him  in  their  manner,  and 
he  requited  their  love,  —  more  justly,  I  must  say, 
than  Prince  Hal  dealt  by  his  humble  followers 
when  he  came  to  the  throne  of  his  father.  Like 
them,  he  belonged  to  the  party  of  the  people,  —  no 
Tory,  as  a  shallow  writer  has  termed  him,  though 


THE  WAYSIDE  197 

inwardly  conscious  of  the  distinction  which  nature 
and  habit  make  among  men,  —  but  a  theoretical 
and  inclining  to  be  a  practical  democrat.  On  the 
question  of  human  slavery,  his  sympathies  drew  him 
one  way,  his  party  connections  another  ;  but  it  does 
not  lie  with  those  to  censure  him  who  are  following 
their  party  ringmasters  to  the  renunciation  of  all 
the  principles  they  professed  to  hold.  When  the 
blindness  of  Hawthorne's  party  brought  on  the 
Civil  War,  his  consciousness  of  the  deep  chasm 
between  two  divergent  forms  of  society  led  him  to 
anticipate  national  separation  as  the  natural  result. 
On  a  Christmas  Day  during  that  war  I  dined  with 
him  at  The  Wayside,  and  he  expressed  to  me  the 
opinion  which  he  had  written  to  Mr.  Bridge  at  the 
opening  of  the  armed  conflict,  —  that  the  North 
and  the  South  were  never  one  people,  in  his  view, 
and  that  he  felt  this  while  an  official  at  Salem  and 
at  Liverpool.  He  added,  however,  to  Mr.  Bridge 
what  he  had  no  occasion  to  say  to  me,  knowing  my 
own  attitude  in  the  matter. 

"  If  we  are  fighting  for  the  annihilation  of  slav 
ery,  to  be  sure  it  may  be  a  wise  object,  and  the  only 
one  which  is  consistent  with  a  future  reunion  be 
tween  the  North  and  South.  We  should  then  see 
the  expediency  of  preparing  our  black  brethren  for 
future  citizenship,  by  allowing  them  to  fight  for 
their  own  liberties,  and  educating  them  through 
heroic  influences." 


198       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

In  the  first  part  of  this  statement,  Hawthorne 
agreed  exactly  with  John  Quincy  Adams  in  1820, 
presupposing  emancipation  and  reunion  ;  and  in  the 
second  part  (arming  the  blacks)  he  agreed  pre 
cisely  with  my  old  friend  John  Brown.  As  nobody 
has  ever  doubted  their  anti-slavery  sentiments,  so, 
I  submit,  we  have  no  reason  to  doubt  Hawthorne's, 
however  late  and  sad  may  have  been  the  facts  that 
converted  him.  Personal  liberty  was  his  theoretic 
principle,  and  it  became  his  practical  choice  for  all 
colors,  when  the  crisis  forced  a  choice  upon  him. 
He  thus  became  the  friend  of  all  the  Afro- Ameri 
cans,  as  in  his  boyhood  he  had  been  the  comrade 
and  respecter  of  the  colored  lad  Symmes  ;  and  the 
friendships  of  Hawthorne  may  well  be  brought  to 
this  philanthropic  close. 

MR.  ADAMS  :  In  the  course  of  his  paper,  Mr. 
Sanborn  made  frequent  reference — and  similar  re 
ferences  have  by  others  been  made,  in  the  course  of 
these  proceedings  —  to  President  Franklin  Pierce. 
Some  of  those  here  who  have  familiarized  them 
selves  with  London  may  have  noticed  a  tablet 
set  in  the  wall  facing  the  busy  street  in  front  of 
where  the  old  Holland  House,  as  it  was  called, 
stood,  —  the  home  of  the  Foxes,  and  in  her  day  of 
the  famous  Lady  Holland.  In  the  tablet  are  cut 
these  lines,  found  in  Lord  Holland's  desk  after  his 
death :  — 


THE    WAYSIDE  199 

"  Nephew  of  Fox  and  friend  of  Gray, 

Be  this  nay  deed  of  fame, 
That  those  who  knew  me  best  can  say 
He  sullied  neither  name." 

Nearly  forty  years  have  elapsed  since  the  deaths 
of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  and  Franklin  Pierce,  — 
the  two  college  friends  at  Bowdoin  ;  and  at  this 
centennial  of  Hawthorne's  birth,  it  is  curious  to 
reflect  that  the  chief  claim  to  remembrance  of  the 
thirteenth  of  our  presidents  will  be  as  in  the  case 
of  Lord  Holland.  He  rested  his  claim  for  remem 
brance  on  being  "  nephew  of  Fox  and  friend  of 
Gray ;  "  and  so  with  Pierce :  his  chief  ground  for 
recollection  hereafter  will  be  that,  a  classmate  of 
Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  sub 
sequently  wrote  his  biography;  and  it  fell  to 
Franklin  Pierce,  as  President  of  the  United  States, 
to  enable  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  to  emerge  from 
under  that  cloud  of  the  res  angusta  domi  which 
had  darkened  his  earlier  life. 

It  only  remains  to  read  one  or  two  short  letters 
before  this  series  of  meetings  is  brought  to  a  close. 

FROM   MISS    BEATRIX   HAWTHORNE 

18  HIGHLAND  ST.,  CAMBRIDGE. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  I  cannot  leave  Bos 
ton  without  trying  in  part  to  thank  you  for  the 
many  delightful  experiences  of  yesterday.  I  shall 
never  forget  them  —  your  warm  hospitality,  the 


200  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

meeting  so  many  charming  and  well-known  people, 
of  whom  I  had  so  long  heard ;  the  dear  old  house, 
with  its  setting  of  dark  pines,  and  last  of  all  the 
testimony  of  the  great  flag-draped  rock  with  its 
inscription.  Added  to  these  is  the  abiding  memory 
of  the  delightful  addresses  in  honor  of  my  grand 
father,  and  you  can  see  I  have  much  to  thank  you 
for.  I  shall  be  with  you  in  spirit  for  the  next  few 
days !  How  I  wish  I  were  to  hear  Mrs.  Howe,  Mr. 
Conway,  Mrs.  Elliott,  Mr.  Sanborn,  and  the  others. 
How  deeply  I  shall  value  those  beautiful  photo 
graphs.  Please  remind  me  most  warmly  to  all  my 
friends  of  yesterday,  and  with  warm  thanks  to  you 
and  your  daughter, 

Cordially  yours, 

BEATRIX  HAWTHORNE. 

FROM  HON.  JOHN  D.  LONG 

BOSTON,  June  14,  1904. 

DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  I  very  much  appreciate 
your  kind  invitation  to  me  to  be  a  guest  at  your 
house  July  4th  and  7th,  and  to  preside  at  one  of  the 
Hawthorne  memorial  mornings. 

Mrs.  Long  is  now  halfway  over  sea  on  a  trip  to 
Europe,  and  is  therefore  unable  to  acknowledge 
your  courtesy,  which  I  am  sure  she  will  very  much 
appreciate  when  I  inform  her  of  it.  I  cannot  my 
self  accept  your  kind  invitation,  because  I  am 
under  engagements  for  that  time.  But  I  thank 


THE   WAYSIDE  201 

you  very  much  for  your  courtesy,  remembering  as 
I   do  a  previous   somewhat  similar  visit  at  your 
home ;  and  with  most  cordial  good  wishes  for  the 
occasion  and  regards  for  yourself,  I  am 
Truly  yours, 

JOHN  D.  LONG. 

FROM  HON.  HENRY  CABOT  LODGE 

NAHANT,  MASS.,  June  15,  1904. 

MY  DEAR  MADAM  :  I  am  very  much  obliged 
and  complimented  by  your  kind  note  and  invitation 
to  deliver  an  address  on  Hawthorne  at  your  meeting 
in  July,  and  I  should  like  very  much  to  accept,  but, 
I  am  sorry  to  say,  it  will  be  impossible  for  me  to 
be  present,  as  I  have  made  my  plans  to  go  away  on 
my  vacation  for  the  entire  month  of  July,  which 
prevents  my  accepting  any  invitation  for  that 
month. 

With  renewed  regret  that  I  cannot  come,  believe 
me,  Very  truly  yours, 

H.  C.  LODGE. 

MBS.  H.  M.  LOTHKOP. 

FROM   MRS.    HARRIET   PRESCOTT   SPOFFORD 

DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP:  I  wish  I  could  go  to 
Concord  for  those  delightful  exercises,  —  and  to  see 
Wayside  again,  —  and  to  see  you  !  You  are  most 
kind  to  ask  me,  but  it  is  quite  impossible.  The  sea 
has  used  me  very  ill,  as  it  always  does  nowadays,  — 


202       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

so  that  it  takes   me   weeks   to   recover   from   its 
cruelty,  and  I  am  still  unable  to  get  about. 

So  you  see,  of  course,  I  cannot  send  any  poem  to 
your  festival.  One  would  need  a  longer  time  and  all 
one's  thought  to  do  that  fittingly,  even  if  one  could 
do  it  at  all,  —  if,  indeed,  there  were  any  poet  born 
who  could  imprison  in  his  verse  anything  of  the 
delicate  aura  which  was  Hawthorne's  personality. 
How  fortunate  you  are  to  be  living  in  what  was  his 
home !  I  should  expect  to  see  him  in  any  twilight, 
—  between  you  and  me,  —  in  any  moonbeam ! 

Hoping  I  may  soon  see  you  here, 

Always  affectionately, 
HARRIET  PRESCOTT  SPOFFORD. 

DEER  ISLAND,  NEAR  NEWBURYPORT,  MASSACHUSETTS, 
June  twenty-ninth,  1904. 

FROM   HON.    ROBERT   S.   RANTOUL 

THE  ESSEX  INSTITUTE,  SALEM,  MASS., 
July  2, 1904. 

DEAR  MADAM  :  I  acknowledge  with  thanks  the 
receipt  of  your  interesting  programme  for  the  Haw 
thorne  Centenary,  together  with  a  ticket  and  a  cor 
dial  invitation  to  preside  at  the  Thursday  morning 
session.  I  feel  highly  complimented  to  be  thought 
of  in  this  connection,  and  so  flatteringly  as  your 
note  implies.  But  I  must  deny  myself  this  plea 
sure.  My  official  connection  with  the  Institute  will 
have  ceased  before  that  day,  and  I  suppose  the  in- 


THE   WAYSIDE  203 

vitation  to  be  partially  due  to  the  position  which  I 
have  held  there,  and  at  the  Hawthorne  Centennial 
observances  at  Salem  on  the  twenty-third  ultimo. 
I  should  gladly  have  contributed  more  largely  than  I 
have  to  honoring  the  memory  of  Hawthorne.  I  re 
call  him  and  his  striking  presence  with  a  good  deal 
of  interest,  as  a  frequenter  of  my  father's  office  in 
Boston  between  the  years  1845  and  1852.  Prob 
ably  I  saw  him  once  or  twice  after  that.  I  have  no 
reminiscences  which  could  be  made  available  for 
your  purpose,  but  I  have  enjoyed  thoroughly  the 
opportunity  which  seemed  to  be  open  to  me,  as  Presi 
dent  of  the  Essex  Institute,  to  help  in  placing  the 
great  American  Romancer  upon  the  pedestal  where 
he  belongs,  through  the  testimony  of  persons  so 
qualified  to  record  their  estimates  of  the  man  and 
of  his  genius  that  what  they  have  said  must  be 
accepted  by  the  reading  public  without  reserve. 
I  am,  very  respectfully  yours, 

ROBERT  S.  RANTOUL. 

FROM  JUDGE  ROBERT  GRANT 

MATANE,  P.  Q.,  June  24,  1904. 

DEAR  MADAM  :  Your  letter  has  been  forwarded 
to  me  in  Canada,  where  I  am  fishing.  I  return 
home  on  the  28th,  but  my  associate  judge  goes 
away  on  the  1st,  and  I  have  binding  court  engage 
ments  for  the  5th,  6th,  and  7th,  which  forbid  abso 
lutely  my  attending  the  Hawthorne  Centenary  on 


204       HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

those  days.  As  to  the  4th,  if  I  can  come,  I  will ; 
but  my  young  people  have  demands  on  me  for  that 
day,  and  I  doubt  very  much  if  I  shall  be  permitted 
to  leave  home.  I  am  sorry  that  my  response  is 
delayed  ;  but  the  cause  is  apparent.  I  have  not 
leisure  to  prepare  an  address  at  this  late  day,  at 
any  rate,  much  as  I  should  have  liked  to  have  joined 
with  you  all  in  tribute  to  Nathaniel  Hawthorne. 
But  I  am  a  wretched  speaker,  so  no  one  will  miss 
anything. 

Yours  sincerely, 

EGBERT  GRANT. 

FROM  MRS.  ELIZABETH  STUART  PHELPS  WARD 

NEWTON  CENTRE,  MASS., 
June  25,  1904. 

DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  I  have  your  letter  ask 
ing  me  to  take  part  in  the  Concord  observance  of 
the  centenary  of  Hawthorne's  birth.  It  is  quite 
impossible  for  me  to  do  so,  as  I  am  not  strong 
enough  to  travel  at  all ;  but  I  am  very  sorry,  for 
there  is  no  American  writer  whom  I  should  more 
delight  to  honor,  than  Hawthorne. 

He  was  great,  he  was  grave,  he  was  unique.  In 
these  days  of  lightness,  of  flippancy,  and  of  imita 
tion,  he  is  as  much  a  rebuke  to  English  literature 
as  he  is  an  inspiration  to  it. 

I  am,  very  truly  yours, 
ELIZABETH  STUART  PHELPS  WARD. 


THE  WAYSIDE  205 

FROM   DR.    EDWARD    EVERETT    HALE 

39  HIGHLAND  ST.,  ROXBUKY,  MASS., 
June  17,  1904. 

DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  I  find  no  memoranda 
of  the  few  occasions  when  I  met  Mr.  Hawthorne  in 
1841  and  1842.  The  bookshop  kept  by  Dr.  Pea- 
body  and  his  daughter,  Miss  Elizabeth  Peabody, 
was  then  a  favorite  resort  of  young  people,  and  old, 
who  were  fond  of  reading  and  liked  to  avail  them 
selves  of  their  French  and  German  books.  From 
the  occasional  meeting  of  such  people  there  grew  up, 
quite  without  method,  a  different  series  of  evening 
conversations  in  the  parlor  of  the  house.  I  remem 
ber  with  most  distinctness  a  certain  gathering,  I 
think  once  a  week,  where  it  was  arranged  that  Miss 
Margaret  Fuller  should  be  present.  I  think  these 
were  perhaps  called  a  "  class  "  of  Miss  Fuller's. 

What  was  most  interesting  to  me  was  the  ease 
with  which  she  threw  off  all  homage  to  herself,  or 
token  of  admiration,  and  kept  the  conversation  on 
the  subject  assigned  for  the  evening,  drawing  out 
the  different  people  present  with  a  skill  which 
seemed  to  me  almost  curious. 

At  one  or  other  of  such  "conversations,"  I  met 
Mr.  Hawthorne  for  the  first  time.  He  that  very 
year  wrote  one  or  more  stories,  among  his  best,  for 
my  brother's  magazine,  the  "  Boston  Miscellany." 
The  Peabodys  were  Salem  people,  and  I  suppose  it 
was  in  that  way  that  he  was  one  of  the  intimates  of 


206  HAWTHORNE   CENTENARY 

the  house.  He  may  have  been  engaged  at  that  time  to 
Miss  Sophia  Peabody,  who  was  the  youngest  of  the 
Misses  Peabody,  and  a  very  beautiful  young  woman. 
I  was  quite  familiar  at  that  time  with  Haw 
thorne's  early  writings.  I  am  quite  sure  I  should 
have  noticed  or  recollected  anything  of  importance 
which  he  said,  had  he  said  anything.  But  I  do 
not  believe  that  he  ever  contributed  to  the  conversa 
tion.  I  have  a  distinct  feeling  that  we  thought  he 
did  not  like  to  talk,  and  that  he  would  not  talk  on 
any  such  occasion.  It  is  so  that  I  cannot  write  you 
anything  but  this  in  regard  to  him.  We  thought 
him  very  handsome,  and  he  certainly  was. 
Always  truly  yours, 

EDW.  E.  HALE. 

FROM   HON.   JOHN   HAY 

DEPARTMEKT  OF  STATE, 
Washington,  June  20, 1904. 

MY  DEAR  MADAM  :  I  have  received  your  kind 
letter  of  the  19th  of  June,  inviting  me  to  be  present 
at  the  ceremonies  incident  to  the  centenary  of  the 
birth  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne. 

I  have  an  engagement  at  Detroit,  Michigan,  on 
the  5th  of  July,  which  makes  it  impossible  to  avail 
myself  of  your  courtesy. 

I  am,  with  many  thanks, 

Sincerely  yours, 

JOHN  HAY. 

MRS.  H.  M.  LOTHBOP,  The  Wayside,  Concord,  Mass. 


THE   WAYSIDE  207 

FROM  MRS,  JAMES  T.  FIELDS 
MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SBA,  MASS.,  June  29,  1904. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  LOTHROP  :  An  attack  of  pneu 
monia  six  weeks  ago  makes  it  impossible  for  me 
to  think  of  going  to  Concord  in  response  to  your 
kind  invitation,  nor  do  I  at  present  think  of  any 
thing  to  add  in  writing  beyond  what  Mr.  Fields 
has  given  to  the  world  in  "  Yesterdays  with  the 
Authors,"  and  I  myself  have  done  in  the  brief 
life  in  the  series  of  Beacon  Biographies.  Your  gen 
erous  hospitality,  my  dear  Mrs.  Lothrop,  would 
make  it  easy  indeed  to  respond  to  your  call  if  it 
were  possible. 

Believe  me, 

Very  truly  yours, 

ANNIE  FIELDS. 

MR.  ADAMS  :  The  programme  has  now  been 
brought  to  its  close ;  but  before  this  audience  dis 
perses,  while  I  do  not  think  it  necessary  to  ask  for 
any  formal  expression,  from  those  here,  of  recogni 
tion  and  appreciation  of  the  labor  Mrs.  Lothrop  has 
so  kindly  assumed  in  the  affair,  I  feel  it  is  none  the 
less  due  to  her ;  she  has  carried  it  out,  and  I  there 
fore  feel  that  I  express  the  general  sense  of  all  who 
are  here  when  I  say  to  her  that  we  fully  appreciate 
the  feeling  of  profound  relief  she  must  experience 
that  the  Concord  Hawthorne  Centennial  is  here 
brought  to  a  successful  termination. 


208  HAWTHORNE  CENTENARY 

MRS.  LOTHROP:  Permit  me,  in  expressing  my 
thanks  to  the  presiding  officer  and  to  you  all  for 
this  kind  recognition  and  appreciation,  to  take  this 
opportunity  to  thank  all  these  friends  who  have 
addressed  us.  Their  responses  to  my  request  to 
take  part  in  these  proceedings  have  resulted  in  the 
admirable  presentations  of  Hawthorne's  life  and 
work  that  have  made  this  series  of  meetings  a  fit 
ting  observance  of  the  centenary  of  his  birth. 


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